a meditation on weeding

 

 

As trite as it may be to use gardening as a metaphor for living, I find myself while on my knees in my garden pulling out weeds doing just that.

The dictionary defines a weed as “a valueless plant growing wild, especially one that grows on cultivated land… any undesirable or troublesome plant…that grows profusely where it is not wanted.”

What makes a plant or a thought or a behavior desirable? And what does weeding out what is troublesome entail?

I follow the word cultivate — to till, to refine, to promote growth and nurture — from the root kwel: to revolve, move around, dwell; to the Latin colere, to cultivate, inhabit, to the Greek and Sanskrit, circle, wheel. Which takes me to a garden or a life that is worked and cared for. Carl Jung wrote that the circle and the wheel were symbols for the transcendent Self, what he also called “the ordering principle.” Which brings us around to a cultivated consciousness.

Jung spoke of differentiated feeling, a fine-tuned judgment call that translates into living one’s values.

When is a weed a wildflower? Desirable. Or an invasive strangling vine? Unwanted. How much is in the eyes of the beholder?

How do we weed out our demons? And we all have them. Things we work on.

It’s those “weeds” with the roots that go so far down and back, that return year after year, which insist that we go deeper into our selves into the untilled ground of our being, that ask more from us and lead us back to our humanity.

However we make room for and express our uniqueness, however wild or staid, let us treasure the flowers.