You know you are a gardener when...
I was at a friends house last week and while I waited for her to open the door I found myself weeding her front garden. Now that might not sound so strange to you but I spent most of my life telling people that I had a black thumb, meaning that I could kill a plan just by looking at it.
Every time Francoise (www.compassionfatigue.ca) and I ran a workshop on Vicarious trauma, self care and burnout, when we got to the part where we had the group brainstorm ways to take good care of themselves at least half of the group would mention gardening. Like a good facilitator I nodded and smiled and wrote it down, all the while thinking…WHAT?? How could anyone want to do that after a long day at work?
Finally after years of letting the lovely garden that came with my house (Francoise’s old house) fallow and grow into something that could only be seen in a story about Sleeping Beauty, I started with one 2×2 area to plant some herbs. While I couldn’t garden, I did love to cook. Wow, you would think I had invented a cure for world hunger by the way I could work that herb garden into almost every conversation. Wow, that reminds me of last night when I was picking fresh basil from my herb garden. Or did you know that planting mint near the house keeps ants away?
Seriously…so this year seeing the fruits of my labour last spring and fall burst their dear little heads from my weedy yet well mulched soil has me thinking. Of course helping professionals love to garden, we can actually see the benefit of our hard work! While there are set backs like virulent weeds, slugs, bugs, inclement weather, partial shade, squirrels, you can triumph and through back breaking hard work, sweat, luck and sometimes in the case of my roses, neglect, manage to see success and beauty in a way that sometimes doesn’t come through our work.
Thank you to all of you who for 10 years held up gardening as the dominant self care ritual. And all along I thought it was a massage. Until I realized that massage therapists love to talk to me about their own compassion fatigue, but that is another post. The silence and beauty of my garden is a prayer and a blessing, thank you thank you thank you.
