Learning about life from my garden

Tools for life lessons

A number of years ago - probably nearly 20 now - who can keep track? - a woman shared a bit of wisdom with me about life lessons. Always one to collect quotes or brief snippets that appealed to me, I kept it. It was:

RULES FOR BEING HUMAN

1. You will receive a body.  You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.

2. You will learn lessons.  You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life.  Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons.  You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons.  Growth is a process of trial and error and experimentation.  The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ulti­mately "works.”

4. A lesson is repeated until learned.  A lesson will be present­ed to you in various forms until you have learned it.  When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons does not end.  There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons.  If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

6. "There" is no better place than "here.”  When your "there" has become a "here,” you will simply obtain another "there" that will again, look better than "here.”

7. Others are merely mirrors of you.  You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you some­thing you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you.  You have all the tools and resources you need.  What you do with them is up to you.  The choice is yours.

9. Your answers lie inside you.  The answers to life's questions lie inside you.  All you need to do is look, listen and trust.

10. You will forget all this.

Author unknown, found on a refrigerator in Toronto

The most memorable zinging words were, "you will forget all this." Thus the need to be open to "relearning" perhaps in new, deeper ways the basic lessons of life, of which, I've decided there are too many to count on both hands. 

And so my garden has become my latest and possibly most patient and determined teacher. Clearly I am in need of a refresher coure in life lessons I'd forgotten I forgot, or perhaps ones where I haven't received the passing grade that will let me move on to the next lesson. 

When I started my garden a few years back in just a few months I had studied:

• patience
• understanding when enough is enough
• planning
• collaboration
• sharing
• tenacity
• peacefulness
• satisfaction
• curiosity
• acceptance and 
• adaptability. 

In no particular order these lessons popped into my consciousness like sprouts that push throught hte earth. One minute nothing is there, the next there is a fresh budding insight, to be nurtured and fed. Hopefully to develop into a fully formed healthy insight that can be appreciated and savored. 

I've learned patience in many ways, the obvious, waiting for seeds to sprout, the less obvious waiting for weather to accommodate my desire to plant NOW! Trying to move tender greenhouse started seedling outside because I'm ready risks losing all. Obvious enough yet when impatience is at its height, it can be almost painful the waiting, the "doing nothing" (As if waiting for the proper conditions weren't work) that is required of successful gardeners. Not satisfied with the growth in the greenhouse, when the calendar said Spring, I ignored the wisdom of experience gardeners and seed packet instructions and started to move things outside because I was ready to experience my perception of being a gardener. Needless to say the poor things suffered with cold snaps. Pricy oca, organic pepper starts and flowers (cosmos and chrysanthemums) all had their leaves bleached white with cold. They struggled because of me but managed to live, stunted perhaps but at least there. 

That was the first year. Since then I've following the lead of the weather rather than feeling like I need to bend it to my will. I've asked for and been given help and advise (gardeners are the original collaborative spirits I've decided) and I've not given up when various pests and blights have occurred, but tried to outwit them without using chemicals, getting more and more curious about how they occur and how to quell them. And I've accepted the inevitable when there have been failures, ripping out one thing and planting something else, adapting to the world as it is.

My garden has taught me in ways that people couldn't. A garden has no intention but to grow, unlike people who may have intentions that frustrate ours. Listening to the lessons that it teaches has been much easier (and more true) than listening to people who I could watch do just the opposite. 

There are more lessons in my garden. I've passed it's first round of tests and am moving on...