We Are Like Gardens

Why change can be so goddamn hard & an alternative

Photo by Lizzi

I am currently engaged in a change experiment.

I had become everso-slightly unhealthily attached to checking my Substack stats on my phone 🙄. I challenged myself to NOT DO THIS for a whole week, and if I managed it I would reward myself £25 to spend on whatever I wanted.

I completed the week and bought myself some decadent rose & cardamom bliss balls and a gorgeous little pale jade hand-thrown mug. I haven’t checked stats on my phone since.

This week I thought I’d try the same trick on ‘scrolling on my phone’, which makes my head go mushy. I made it to three days but just now I was a few minutes into a deep scroll of random gossipy news stories before I remembered. Oops. I have just re-started my week and I will try again.

Change can be easy like this, no? Let’s enter our garden analogy. Just a little prune here, a few seeds scattered there, and a whole area of my internal garden is transformed. These little tweaks can have a big effect on our daily lives too - since detaching from my phone a little I feel steadier, less scattered, and more in-the-world.

Would I try this change-and-reward experiment out on my relationship with food or exercise, having a week off sugar or trying ten minutes of weight lifting a day?

No. No, I wouldn’t.

Through decades of experience I know that this area of my internal ecology is more tangled, more complicated. It’s like a dark corner of my garden beyond the trees that is prone to ground elder, and that does best when I mostly leave it alone. When I have planted seeds down there in the past, they have been choked by a lack of light. When I’ve disturbed the ground by trying to dig out weeds, it’s as if they’ve been encouraged. They come back even stronger than before.

Photo by Annie Spratt

I love using gardens as an analogy for our internal systems. Like gardens, we are a blend of the results of intentional effort, plus the effects of wildness and weather. We have inherited our unique internal ‘plot of land’ from our many ancestors and it has been shaped by their joys and their traumas, especially by those of our primary caregivers. It may change its shape quite dramatically over the course of our lifetime, but we can still see the place where the pond used to be, and those self-seeded bright orange poppies return year after year after year.

One of the most distressing and the most wonderful things I’ve learnt as I’ve got older is that I can’t totally control my internal garden. Some of it (flower beds) is relatively easily rearranged, like my scrolling-on-my-phone habit. Some of it (that big old oak tree) is more resistant to change, like my eating habits. Some of it (the type of soil in my garden, whether it is next to a mountain or to a river), like my introversion or my love of writing, is almost etched in stone.

Why is this distressing? Because there are things that I just can’t do. When I was a little girl I wanted to be a ballerina. I didn’t know then that my body would grow to be so curvy, or that my brain would grow to be so rebellious. Being a ballerina is not within my capacity, and there are many many other things that I will also never be or do or have, however much I might want them. There is an appropriate grieving that blooms when I truly encounter these limits.

Why wonderful? Because - the RELIEF. My garden is how it is.

Of course I never really know what’s going to happen. Someone might build a damn, and the river that runs along the wild bottom of my garden might go somewhere else entirely. I might find that after chipping away at a pernicious weed for twenty years, it suddenly clears up, never to return. I might be visited for the first time ever by a roe deer. I always keep an open mind, and I am always open to the Universe knowing more than I do about what is possible and what should happen next.

And. It’s so wonderful to stop fighting. To begin to relax into the beauty that is already there. To listen to the birdsong and to smell the roses and to Just. Be. Satya.

So what’s the alternative to change that I promised you in the title?

Photo by Annie Spratt

Acceptance.

Surrender.

Meeting-what-is and finding ways of being okay with what-is.

Moving towards appreciating all the unique features of your particular garden - exploring it and building a relationship with it and wondering at why things are the way they are without needing them to be different.

Moving towards accepting the particular kinds of gardens we are.

Moving towards letting go of our unrealistic hopes-for-change - the things that are, for whatever reason, just beyond us right now (or maybe forever).

Moving towards loving the gardens we are.

Can you feel the sweetness of this?

Go gently,
Satya <3

🌼 🌼 🌼

Tell me: What kind of garden are you? What are your favourite bits? Your least favourite bits? How would it be to bring more acceptance to the basic conditions of your garden and to learn to work within these conditions, rather than fighting them? How was it to read this piece? What does your garden need? I’d love to hear from you.

(Join me in June for a whole month of Kissing the Earth.)

Photo by Robert Katzki