Why I Love Gardening: Part I, Watering and Weeding

I mentioned to a coworker, that every day in Benin holds a surprise.  The day I write this post, the surprise is that mowing a lawn is serious work but so rewarding.  I had my 5^th gardening lesson on Saturday morning.  We worked on attaching the vines to the walls, trim smaller hedges and shape up the edges of the grass.  Next lesson: organic pest control (with Neem Oil extract) and making pretty rows.

Over the course of the past lessons I become more and more convinced that gardening is probably one of the best metaphors for life. My first lesson I learned about the 4 key components of gardening: watering, weeding, trimming and pest control. All are so applicable to life.

Watering: Nothing can survive for long without water.  The plants in my garden are beautiful but if they don’t get regular watering, they’ll suffer a sad demise.  In life, nourishment is so important, not only physically but also spiritually.  In the Bible, the Word is often referred to as water.  Water is such an essential element in life and what God has to say to me is such an important element in my life, especially during this transition to life in Cotonou.  What is He saying these days includes gems like:  be brave, you’re not alone, you bring something special to this place, I am your constant companion.   And when there is a good watering, life flows.  There is a tree in my garden that a mere week ago was nothing but a wishbone: sticks  

Look at the progress it has made:

After two waterings (some by me, most by the early rains of the rainy season), it’s pushed out @6 beautiful green leaves.  Though it’s still not as pleasing to the eye as some of the other plants, I wanted to start recording it’s progress as it heals and becomes more lovely. I spotted the beauty below in the garden outside of the health unit and recognized the shape of the leaves and branches. 

This is what my wishbone will look like!

Weeding:  In life and in my garden there are the “mauvaises herbes” (aka weeds) that are constantly growing amidst my darling plants.  Weeding is the only activity that a gardener can and should do daily, multiple times per day.  Mowing the lawn, trimming shrubs, and even watering can happen less frequently but weeding should ideally happen constantly. 

I’ve found that same sort of vigilance is essential in my life, particularly weeding out unhelpful, even detrimental thoughts and  activities.  Reading the Bible as well as autobiographies and biographies of greats I've noticed a common thread.  Even though the greatest leaders make mistakes over the course of their lifetime, all have developed excellent habit sand exercise a great deal of discipline of focus and time that helped them to achieve great success.  Vigilance about weeding out the hindrances, barriers and limiting forces or people plays a huge a role in that success.

I need to go finish doing my hair so I decided to do this in two (or perhaps three).  I will talk about trimming and pest control in upcoming posts.

Sweet dreams!