Because what else can you do but make peace with it? Otherwise, you’ll find yourself cursing out the beans that twined themselves around the tomato plants and tried to strangle them, and the two cucumber plants that took over the other half of the garden, shooting out so many cucumbers you ran out of pickle jars to cram them in.
Meanwhile, all the flower seeds you planted and so carefully nurtured for weeks, the bright pink zinnias, the marigolds and the sweet purple basil, came to nothing but a handful of raggedy sprouts. Which makes no sense, when over there, in the sidewalk crack, some bird’s dropped a seed, and wah lah, up came a five-foot high Dr. Suess flower.
Two decades of gardening, and I still don’t understand how it works. But then, I don’t understand much these days. Everyone I know is walking around shellshocked, each hour’s news a fresh horror. Why is this happening? we say to each other.
But we may as well be yelling at the dirt, the sun, the weirdo bug that lays its eggs on the base of the strawberry plant and sucks the whole thing dry.
Do something, a friend urges me when I confess my despair to her. But that’s the problem, I say. Everything I do feels pointless.
She tells me to ask myself three questions: What brings me joy? What am I good at? How can I help?
The place where all three overlap is supposedly the “sweet spot for action.”
I like this, but I don’t think it works in my case. What brings me joy, what I’m good at, is writing. But what good does writing do? Especially now, when any two-bit AI can spit out words on gardening and hopelessness in less than thirty seconds, (another cause of despair!) while here I am, squinting at my computer screen, two hours into it, and still not sure how to tie it all together.
Okay. It has something to do with letting go.
Forget what the plan was (I wanted more than three tomatoes! I didn’t want ten thousand cucumbers!) and accept what I have been given. Beans. Multiple jars of pickles.
Or, it’s about making peace with what I can’t control, in general. But that's the easy response.
Yesterday, I spent the day in the garden, picking cucumbers, untwining bean tendrils from the tomatoes, flicking bugs off the strawberries. And then I watered the raggedy flower sprouts and set them more fully in the sun.
I am not ready to give up on them yet.
