Make Space
“Why, I thought tha’ didn’t know nothin’ about gardening’,” he exclaimed.
“I don’t,” she answered, “but they were so little, and the grass was so thick and strong, and they looked as if they had no room to breathe. So I made a place for them. I don’t even know what they are.”
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
In our front garden, we have tiny bulbs pushing their way past the surface. The kids and I planted our own bulbs with appropriate spacing between them, but I’m afraid the squirrels may have gotten them. But these ones, crammed all together in one spot, must’ve been planted by someone else, and something about our wildly fluctuating weather has triggered the growth process.
The small green shoots have me thinking about Mary and Dickon and Collin, the children of the secret garden, and thinking especially about the above quote by Mary.
The shoots are so little, and it looks as if they have no room to breathe.
Sometimes, when I’m honest, I feel that way too. That there is growth beginning to happen, but that all the things I have on my plate are crowding in around those bits of green progress.
My temptation is to swing wildly between doing all the things and thinking that I need to focus down on one specific area until I master it completely (and therefore never have to deal with it again). But this month, with Mary’s words in my mind, I’ve told myself just to give those areas of growth a little space. A little room to breathe.
What that means in the every day, outside of the metaphor, is inviting in the quiet, slowing down a little bit, trying not to fill every nook and cranny of my day, keeping myself from shoving my own thoughts and feelings into a back corner where I don’t have to listen to them.
The every day doesn’t stop—and it shouldn’t—we are clearing space in our gardens, not razing them to the ground and starting over again. There are still children to teach (and feed and clothe and correct and drag to basketball practice). There are still clothes to fold and dishes to wash and appointments to make and toilets to plunge. There are texts to answer and dogs to walk and litter to scoop (unfortunately). These aren’t things to get rid of. They are parts of being alive.
But if we try…we can create a little bit of space in our every day (even if it’s just a very little bit of space), and we can see what grows when it’s given a place, a little bit of room to breathe.
And we may be surprised by the beauty that pushes through the dirt in our cleared out gardens.
