Life Weeds

I like to pull weeds. Honestly, I like pulling weeds. I often weed the yards of friends when they are not looking. It is the quickest solution to a parasitic problem. I feel great doing it. Weeding is a great time to think. There isn't much else to do with your brain while weeding because weeding takes very little brain power. When you first start out gardening you have to be careful not to pull the desired plant along with the weeds. After practice the identification of weeds and desired plants becomes easy and automatic. You can also recognize younger and younger plants and get rid of them before they get bigger. (the only thing that makes a weed different from another plant is how welcome it is. A tomato is a weed if you don't want it growing in with the peonies.) My sisters tell me of a time when my father reluctantly helped my mother with the weeding. He was almost finished when my mother screamed that he had just pulled all of the onions. He thought they were grass. I think he just doesn't like to weed and didn't want to be asked to help again. He prefers to help in other ways.

In our lives we have things that like weeds are parasitic. I will call them life weeds. Our lives are cluttered full of way too much stuff. We have distractions, bad habits, addictions, laziness, procrastination, fear of failure, insistence on perfection which prevents completion and obligations that take our time and give nothing in return. Wow, I could do a post on each one of those. They keep us from harvesting those fruits of life we wish to harvest most. But unlike physical weeds, life weeds are not quickly dealt with. Some of them we are unaware of. So, maybe this is one of the reasons I like to do physical weeding. I can pick a patch of garden, assess the need, and have it clear of weeds in what seems to be just a few moments. It is simple. I am not as adept at weeding life weeds. I could identify many of them, probably down the the genus species if there were a taxonomy for life weeds. Ridding my life of them is another story.

I have learned that it is extremely important to quickly remove weeds, the literal and the symbolic one. Weeds when left to their own will grow in strength and become nearly impossible to deal with without causing harm to the desirable plants in a garden. When left alone weeds propagate and become a much bigger problem. Life weeds are similar to this behavior as well. In regards to religion I compare this to sins, a topic for a different blog. When a behavior is not corrected it becomes a habit and much more difficult to deal with. Bad habits lead to other bad habits. It can be a devastating cycle. How do I change behavior? How do I do some weeding in my life? It is hard. Often during introspection I wonder why I keep doing things that I hate and why I can't seem to fix them. Why do I resolve to correct the same thing week after week? I am sure this is not uncommon.

The irony in this blog called In the Garden and this post called Life Weeds, is that sometimes I use the garden and weeding to avoid other more important needs. Instead of weeding my life I weed the garden. I am working hard and doing a good thing. That should be a good use of my time. I wonder if other people do good things to not feel bad about not doing the more important higher priority things? For me, weeding the garden can be a life weed.