Gardening is a Mindful Practice
I have practised various approaches to mindfulness for over thirty years. I also have ADHD and PTSD. Finding ways of taking my mindfulness into my daily life was easier than forming a formal sitting routine. My ADHD can’t do routines. I know. I’ve tried for the last 70 yrs. So many years ago I looked around my life to see what I could convert. That is when I realised I already had a deep mindfulness practice in my passions.
Writing and gardening are my two life passions (not person-centred ones of course — they are different). In this essay I shall focus on gardening but writing is part of it too. Writing about a year in my garden will be my 16th Book to be published, hopefully next year.
I’m lucky, I live in a rural setting where largish gardens are possible, and I only buy properties which have enough land to create something. Not always possible but my husband buys the house and I buy the gardens. We have been in our present house for the last seven years and the garden has transformed massively, from a totally mown and pruned desert of grass with a monoculture of weed trees, into a richly planted and varied ecosystem and diversity supportive range of features. These include flowering plants for early pollinators, and in fact all year round pollinators, many log piles and naturally rotting material for the microscopic creatures — the detrivores, and shelter for small wood mice and other necessary rodents, including our local red squirrels.
Gardening is the biggest part of my mindfulness practice. I commune with nature, with the soil, with the plants. I connect with the soil itself, feel its life force against my skin, breathe in its energy all around me.
I am aware of the seasons, the daily changes in weather, of climate shifts as they manifest.
I am at one with my body when I am in the garden, able to recognise the limits of my body, able to recognise the gap between my aspirations and my lived reality at this age and to work with acceptance of all that entails.
I am fully present, but assessing the past and future in context, being with the temporal trio in a healthy balanced peaceful way.
Once upon a time, as a child, I was desperate to get away from my parents and family and be free, as I imagined adulthood would be. The past haunted me, traumatised me, and the present was scarcely bearable far too often to minimise the impact it had on me. The future was my escape to come. But this stopped me living my life as it happened, the essence of mindful living.
Gardening is an antidote to the ‘escape from life’ approach to life. It changes the pace of life to calm, connected, engaged.
Gardening can be a source of stress, that feeling of overwhelm when there is far more to do than you can manage in the given timescales of season and one’s own bodily limits. This is also a gift though. It reminds me not to take on too much, not to have expectations of what I can manage, to allow nature to take over sometimes and to accept all of it with good grace.
I am learning to accept the limits, and also the extent, of my gardening knowledge and experience. It was all gained whilst doing, looking things up to learn more as the need came to me. The blessings of the internet and my once extensive collection of gardening books, now mostly given to charity shops. Space dictated that when we downsized seven years ago.
As mentioned my other passion is writing, especially writing memoir and noting all my experiences and ideas down. Sometimes as prose and sometimes as poems. There are enough poems about the garden to fill an entire collection. I don’t know for whom. Posterity perhaps, for the benefit of those who do follow me, for the people of the future who might be interested? For myself and my own enjoyment, my self-exploration and self-expression certainly.
My current writing project takes a diary approach to a year in my garden. I started it in December on the winter solstice, inspired by another book I had just read about a relationship with a garden. I am recording my progress through the year, the help I get, the mindfulness challenges faced, the changing climate and how it affects everything, mostly adversely. It is a project that finishes in just over two months. I shall miss it when it’s gone. I am already looking around for new projects.
We have been making monthly You Tube films of the garden in progress but these are far more about the flowers and seasonal changes in growth, much less about self reflections. It is the writing where this takes place, where I can explore my sense of adventure, optimism, and reluctant acceptance, sometimes, of what is rather than what I want to be.
Life is a great teacher of mindfulness and its central teachings of impermanence, non-being and interconnectedness. Gardening brings them into sharp focus.
My trees are just trees, they do not compete or worry about if they’re good enough, they just are. They have no sense of being something — a self. They simply live their lives.
The seasons do not fret when they must yield to what comes next, neither do the plants. They simply surrender to their time.
Everything in the garden lives an interconnected life by sharing the environment, by each plant bringing with it something that enriches the environment so that all other plants benefit. Fallen leaves create mulch to protect against cold and to replenish the soil. Some plants capture nutrients and feed them back into the soil. There is so much we cannot see about the relationships between various kinds of plants, and we are only just becoming aware of this.
When an ecosystem is in balance it kind of takes care of itself. When it is artificially manipulated, like in a garden, labour is involved to keep it under control. How much suffering do we bring upon ourselves because we have to manipulate rather than allow the natural world to flourish for our benefit. The more I seek to work with nature and be minimalist in my garden, the more joy I get from it. Writing about all this in my current book in progress has been a constant reminder of my principles to live by from mindfulness teachings, and a constant joy in my life. Even the challenges.