Before the Snowdrops
January hurried in with the zest of a champagne cork, celebrating its freedom from the pressure of holding it all in. This new year’s energy fuelled the ticking off of my list of to-dos that had hung on for most of 2024. It gave me the room I needed to dream and reflect on how I wanted to feel and act in this, my fiftieth year.
My Wild Garden is heavy with rain, and the tall, once lush fennel and purple loosestrife that have served the birds all winter are spent, cracking open but still creating a haven for little creatures not ready to step out until they feel the gentle warming of spring.
As I look out through the lounge window, a sadness falls upon me for the year just gone. Have I neglected the garden? In truth, I have neglected myself.
While the garden wildly thrives in my neglect, I wither in it. I confuse my desire to be wild with letting go of responsibility for myself. I mistake being free with being carefree. I’m learning that being free truly means I must take good care of myself and not be careless. While the chaotic wildness of the garden has deep roots within the earth's wisdom, allowing it to ebb and flow in unison, my chaotic wildness is still rooting down, learning, and tending to wounds with confusion of where to place my trust. Therefore, I am in conflict with letting nature use its wisdom on me without consequence from the interference of my human hands.
Still, the garden chores keep tapping at my door, even though they are not welcome. Not yet. Each chore weighs heavy with those consequences; there’s a risk of cutting off new shoots that could become blooms or taking a leg that still had places to go and other bugs to make a life with – one choice can either deny or give life. I open my shed and see the pile of gardening books (I needed to read their confidence before I listened to mine) sitting on the shelf heavy with outworn messages beckoning me to act, “You must prune your fruit trees NOW”, “10 seeds YOU MUST PLANT NOW” I sarcastically question who pruned the fruit trees before humans or how the seeds found their way to bloom again.
Guidance is welcome, but this is not my way, thankfully. I have more trust in the garden's whispers. Yet, the intensity of my feeling everything makes that “one choice” multiply into a thousand tiny cells questioning a million possibilities – I grieve all of those possibilities. It is paralysing.
I promise to place all those messages in the compost and let some good come of it.
Fifty calls with the immense responsibility to leave this earth with less baggage than I came with. The urge to tidy every piece of loose string left by my ancestors, by me, and leave a legacy of whispers filled with wisdom, joy, and nature is overwhelming, often colliding all the worlds I reside in with one big bang. But I can either stay under the duvet or emerge with the snowdrops.
I feel the magic of my wild garden calling, so I drag the heaviness of responsibility like stones through clay to listen to the whispers waiting for me to hear them.
February appears at the end of a never-ending January with a twinkle of joy to come—and they will come. The snowdrops peek out as if to seal that as a promise.
How important it is to consider deeply what I will plant now.
