Wonder
“Don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself."
—Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life
These days, when I have a swath of unclaimed time, I’ve been letting myself garden.
I say ‘letting myself’ because it feels indulgent. It’s an activity I’ve recently realized I have a big crush on. I’ve gotten shy, even flirtatious with it, only daring to interact with it when conditions are perfect - when I have a good amount of time to devote. Even so, before I dive in, I have to set alarms to make myself stop and walk the dogs, take meetings, talk to my husband. If I didn’t, I’d just keep gardening.
When I say ‘gardening,’ though, I’m not talking about planting and fertilizing and designing and all that. Pretty exclusively, for the last several weeks between bouts of rain, I’ve been weeding.
I tell you, I could weed til the cows came home. And when they arrived I’d shoo them away again lest they start snacking on the weeds I’d already marked as mine to pull. My goodness, the satisfaction of holding a tuft of grass in my garden-gloved fist and wiggling it up out of the mulch, roots and all. Or accidentally tearing grass stalks, leaving the plant in the ground, and going back in with my dandelion extruder to get the rest. Nevermind when I find an actual dandelion – ooohohohohooo boy.
I also am way into ridding the ground of long-dead undergrowth, or plucking woody stems stretching their gangly black skeletons out from green-leaved foundations. Removing what is complete, making space for what wants to grow.
It’s almost embarrassing, how obvious a metaphor it all is.
It’s gotten to the point now that when I walk by others’ gardens and see weeds and dead stuff, it takes some restraint not to wander in and start yanking things. In fact the other day I couldn’t help myself. As I passed a line of agapanthus planted on the sidewalk, without breaking stride I reached out my arm and plucked a 2-foot-long woody stem, which came away with sublime ease. But then I was stuck with it for the last half mile of my walk because there were no green waste bins or wild space in which to readily toss it. Another perfect lesson about not doing others’ work for them, no matter how capable you feel, how in need they seem, and how perfectly happy you’d be to do it.
Hiding in the weeds…
Back in my own garden last weekend, weeding away, I had already blown past the alarm I’d set, deciding the dogs could wait another few minutes for their dinner and letting myself finish the patch I was working on.
It was 2/22/26. I note the date because five days earlier had been the lunar new year, when we moved from the year of the snake to the year of the horse. As I was pulling some dusty gray foliage off a low plant longing to show its yellow flowers, my fingers found something hard and knobby about, oh, half an inch under the mulch.
My friends, it… it was this.
Hard to tell its scale here. It fits more or less in my palm.
Our home was built in 1969. We’ve lived here a year and a half. No idea of whose it might have been or how long ago it got buried. When I joked later to my friend Grace about how it was five days “late” for the new year, she said, “Well it had to dig itself up from the center of the earth to find you … five days is actually quite impressive!”
So we don’t forget
My writing teacher Nancy Aronie repeatedly tells stories of such magical experiences in her life—I’ve heard the same handful over the 25 years I’ve known her, and they never cease to wow me. She says it’s important to keep telling them because if we don’t, the wonder can leave us so fast. We forget, or we write it off, or we stop believing what we experienced. It’s so very human to eclipse the magic in our lives and get back to the business of surviving.
No way am I letting this one go. I immediately started telling everyone I know and now am sharing it with you. I haven’t tried to interpret it, not really. I feel fulfilled enough by the miracle of it. If I were to ascribe any meaning beyond that, it would be something about the rightness of giving myself completely to this ‘silly’ task of weeding that absorbs me, makes me (as Boyd Varty says in the quote above) forget myself - and, as a result, remember everything.
And in case I needed more affirmation beyond the “wow”s I’ve already received from those I’ve told, yesterday - exactly one week since I found the first horse - a member of a women’s group I was in happened to bring gifts for everyone.
People, she… she brought horses.
So now my miracle has a friend. A daughter? A mentee?
Who knows. I’m just keeping my eyes, ears, pores, nerve endings open to whatever wants to find me next. I think it’s one of the ways we find our way back to ourselves, to healing, to wholeness. Individually and collectively.
What about you?
Tell me an unlikely, synchronistic, unbelievable thing that has happened to you. Share the story in the comments if you’d like.
If you don’t find yourself in experiencing synchronicity often, you can certainly shift into the space by just setting the intention to. Say to life, “Show me.” It will.
If you’re looking for some guidance on how, my friend Jane Morgan is particularly good at tracking the instances of magic in life and teaching others to do so. And the aforementioned Grace and I are also offering Portals to Wisdom again, which essentially is all about this.
