How to Be Peaceful While Weeding

Just do the weeding

Another perfect day dawning at Evergreen, with lots of gardening to do!

The other day I came across a word I didn’t know:

equanimous

I looked it up and found that it means calm and composed.

When I am equanimous, I am calm and composed. I am peaceful.

To help me remember this interesting word and its meaning, I did what I’d been taught to do in primary school: I put it into a couple of sentences.

• When I am sipping my morning cup of tea, I am equanimous.

• When I am sniffing a magnolia bloom, I am equanimous.

Then I thought of a time when I’m not equanimous, and put that into a sentence.

• When I am weeding, I am not equanimous.

This made me wonder how I could bring equanimity into that activity.

Weeding is getting rid of something we don’t want. We normally regard it in a negative light. 

We may be angry for the weeds being there, or sad that the weeds have overgrown something we were trying to nurture, or annoyed that we must do weeding when we’d rather be painting our toenails red or the garage wall green.

We may have started out in an equanimous state of mind, but anger, sadness or annoyance drives it away. We’re no longer peaceful. 

How can we be equanimous – peaceful – while weeding?

The spiritual writer and teacher Jan Frazier explains how:

Just do what you are doing. Don’t mind it. Don’t label it. Do it with your pure attention.

Weeds aren’t evil or nasty or deliberately trying to frustrate our efforts to have a perfect garden. They’re just growing. Doing their best to live another day. Just like you and me.

In her little book, Things My Garden Taught Me, Gabrielle Baldwin wrote on page 111:

What is crucial [in gardening] is learning to appreciate and value what is good, without being debilitated by frustration and disappointment at what is not.

This may be the most important lesson my garden has taught me.

I’ve spent years anticipating and working towards a time when all problems would be solved, all battles fought and won, all goals achieved, and I would emerge into sunlit serenity amidst a perfect life in a perfect garden.

But that never happens in life, or in a garden.

Everything we do is a process.

Take my little wild garden, for instance.

• The hyacinths and daffodils have finished flowering and are turning yellow.

• Watercress and mizuna have gone to flower and will have to be pulled out.

• Buddleia branches are leaning low and need to be cut or propped up.

• Snails are merrily munching through the row of red cabbages.

• The striking view of white daisies will soon need to be dead headed.

• There is a spinach plant, a cosmos flower, and white alyssum to be removed from my special bed of calendulas and cornflowers.

• And on it goes.

A spinach plant and cosmos peeping out where they shouldn't be!

But, hey, everlastings are dancing in the breeze, chicory is boldly shooting and ready for the salad bowl, and the Jazz Festival and Gold Bunny roses are bursting skyward with buds.

Jazz Festival rose buds reaching for the sky at Evergreen.

Every Moment Is Perfect

Whatever I’m doing in my garden, or elsewhere, I can be equanimous if I just do what I’m doing without allowing negative thoughts about the task to take control.

When you're weeding, just do the weeding.

And here is a little secret I want to share with you today:

When we are equanimous, every moment is perfect.

With love, Marlane

Reference

Baldwin, Gabrielle. (2017). Things My Garden Taught Me. South Australia: Wakefield Press.