Lovable, unstoppable, robust weeds…. They flower, they flourish, and they’re survivors. On some level, you have to love them and their prickly, jagged, blooming selves… until there are too many.
When the spectacular polygon leaves and ragged flowers surround your house and peek in the windows; when they obliviate your car in a poof of tangled green; when they wrap your ankles and try to pull you to the ground: it’s time to act.
We can have too much of anything – work, play, chocolate, introspection, or plants – and need strategies close at hand for protecting a bit of sacred turf. The weeds never stop growing, so how do we establish a detente, at least, and ideally a sort of fragile conqueror’s peace? It’s the puzzle of life, figuring out how to live beautifully and spaciously in a seeming chaos of rapid-propagation tangles and distractions.
How do we weed out intruding frustrations to make room for beauty and space, and how do we live calmly knowing more are already on their way?
Let’s consider some options….
Strategy 1: Encourage What You Love
Something must always grow.
We don’t use poisons or chemicals here because there are too many other things we love: like the speed-demon chipmunks, the starflowers, and yes, the water that feeds our well. Everything lives, interdependent; to kill the thistles is to eliminate the butterflies. There’s no way to obliterate what we dislike and keep the rest. So, what then?
First: weeds grow best where there’s sunlight and space, so one tactic is to encourage what you want to see every day. Nurture the foxgloves, root for the doug-fir, leave the carpet of creeping myrtle be. Let them cover the earth with green and fill the soil with their roots.
Weeds love sunlight and space, and so do other plants. Weeds, habits, and stagnation all love to grow and expand. If we let the tangles and brambles grow wild, then weeds we have. Or we can choose instead to nurture what we love. As the sword ferns press outward and the cedar saplings stretch wide, there is less and less room for the chaos of brambles, fewer resources remaining for the weeds. Just as your time can only encompass so much, so too the space around you. Choose carefully.
They’ll still be there, but they’ll have to cede some space to beauty.
Strategy 2: Pluck Carefully
With proper metaphoric aplomb, I might encourage you to carefully pluck weeds, individually and by fingertips, from your life and garden. But honestly, my life and garden are too wild for that, my time too precious, and my hands too impatient. I see people doing it and have done it myself; it can be a nice, meditative exercise to kneel on one’s garden cushion and contemplate one wee weed after the next. But, admittedly, it’s best for smaller bits of earth.
If you do decide to pull some weeds from your daily garden, choose carefully. Some things start inauspiciously, like a casual hello, but bloom over time into something grand and colorful. Some little things look harmless enough but spread like bad habits across your field. Pluck carefully.
And, as before, go with the other strategies as well: ignore the little things and focus on the growth of what you want. Or, as we’ll consider next, simply clear broad swaths all at once, as you like.
Strategy 3: Broad Whacks Can Clear the Path
Let’s be real, sometimes the weeds and chaos take over, and the only reasonable solution is to hack a path through. It’s a blunt and rather dramatic solution, but wow it can be satisfying to clean the decks, clear the air, sweep out all the drama and start fresh.
Literally, one of my more well-used tools is a manual weed whacker. You swing, the weeds fall. Through the power of your own actions, you clear a path. It’s incredibly cathartic after a frustrating day at work, with each staccato lop timed impeccably with a bursting memory of your boss. But it’s also limited by the level of your energy, indignation, and muscle. (I looked into high-powered ways to literally clear a garden here, but there’s something to be said for limiting your impacts to the reach of your own strength.)
Loving the Weeds, Loving the Space
In the end, there will always be weeds and there will always be space; sometimes more of one or the other.
At its simplest, simplifying one’s garden and life come to three steps:
The first step is to see.
The second is to imagine.
The third is to try.
