I describe myself as an indoor cat these days, which is mostly true. But without baseball to watch, and now, without Rooney in the house, I’ve resorted to spending more time outside of my house, in my yard, literally digging into new projects. Mostly obsessing with the landscaping around our fire pit.
I’d like to preface this by saying that I don’t like to get dirty or be dirty.
Yes I was a tomboy. Yes I used to play in the dirt. And yes I got very dirty playing baseball and softball.
But somewhere in my mid-thirties I decided to lean into a few of my adult truths:
1. I hate sleeping in tents. I love nature, but I don’t like sleeping on the ground. I’m done pretending.
2. Fireworks are loud and I don’t like them.
3. I don’t like to be dirty. I like my white shoes to stay white and my hair to stay in place.
4. I’ve basically turned in to the character David from Schitt’s Creek.
Which is why, I suppose, Sheila was surprised when I found her in the garden to ask what I thought was a simple question.
“Do we have any weed killer?”
After a short lecture on why she doesn’t buy weed killer, she informed me that if I wanted any weeds to be gone, I needed to pull them out. By hand.
“By the root,” she said.
*Insert David from Schitt’s Creek response here.
Up to this point in the pandemic, my obsession with keeping our fire pit looking nice has been limited to weed whacking around the stones and gravel and stringing white lights in the trees around it. But last weekend, probably as a result of my unwillingness to be in an empty house without Rooney, I decided to put some more work into the landscaping.
Which is why I found myself wearing gardening gloves for the first time in my adult life, down on my hands and knees obsessively pulling weeds from the gravel fire pit.
And the symbolism kept slapping me in the face too hard for me to not write it about it.
I mean the idea that using the short cut – the weed whacker – to get rid of weeds for a few days versus actually pulling the roots out…
How many places in life do we do this?
It is just the perfect analogy for how many of us deal with so many problems and challenges. Especially when it comes to the emotional work we have to do. Don’t get me wrong - it’s important to manage our struggles, whether that be anxiety or depression or stress. But I guess it’s why I’ve become such a big proponent of therapy. And for many of us, a deeper spiritual practice.
We can take the shortcuts - take the easy way out in dealing with our problems. And that might work for awhile. But if we never get around to digging in - and I mean really digging in and getting dirty and putting on gloves and getting to the root of why we do or feel the things we do and feel, then we’re going to find ourselves, day after day, week after week, trying to bat down the same problems over and over and over again.
There is no simple fix if we want our garden to grow. Sometimes we just have to do the work.
And yes, I think I squeezed every last bit out of this analogy that I could….