Weeding Your Garden

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step 11

As the readers of my blog already know, I have a very high tech, nerdy career.  I spend my days in front of a computer writing web pages, utilizing and developing web services, training virtual agents, and helping Avaya’s customers understand and enable cloud technologies.  Rarely a day goes by when I am not presented with something I don’t fully comprehend.  Thankfully, my days typically end with a deeper appreciation and mastery (limited or not) of the latest challenges  None of this is said to brag or beg for sympathy.  It’s what I do and for the most part, I love doing it.

However, that is my workday.  When I am not trying to make the world safe for cloud communication, I lead a very low-tech life.  Despite what folks may think about me, my house is not filled with IoT or similar electronic gadgets.  When I need to know the temperature, the mercury filled thermometer on my front porch does just fine.  I don’t use Google or Alexa to control the lights in my house and I don’t subscribe to any music streaming services.  The radio (strictly Minnesota Public Radio classical and news) and my CD player are more than adequate to satisfy my listening requirements.  Heck, I still read books made of wood pulp.

All of this leads me to what I really want to talk about.  Gardening.  And by gardening, I don’t mean planting seeds or seedlings.  I want to talk about tilling the soil and weeding.

Call me strange, but I love digging in the ground with my shovel and potato fork.  I take great satisfaction from pulling up hunks of earth and separating the dirt from the grasses and weeds.  As the pile of unwanted plants grows, my feeling of joy rises.  I will let others (meaning my wife) plan and plant the garden.  Making ready the garden is my comfort zone.

The same goes for weeding after the garden has taken root.  Pulling a deep-seated dandelion out from the ground is like a shot of adrenalin for me.   While others might find that to be a tedious job, it’s where I take my rewards.  It can be hard work, but it’s never undesirable work. 

Bear with me while I share a poem I wrote about weeding – and by extension, my life.

Mischief Managed

Well, that’s it.  A piece of me that has nothing to do with paying the bills and keeping me off the streets five days a week.  Thank you for reading.

In case you are interested, this is the fruit of today’s labor.  Isn’t it beautiful?

Tags: Garden, Gardening, Poetry, Weeding