The Problem is the Solution

With the springing of Spring, comes the explosion of plants in the wrong place. The ones we are led to believe are weeds. I myself am a recovering weed addict and am still weaning myself off that terminology with variable success. These unwelcome plants are proving to have positive mentally medicinal side effects…..

My posts have been sparse lately because I kind of lost the creative mojo. This past year or so I’ve been delving into the darker parts of my brain to try and figure out what the go is with that. When I worked for the man, he used to bang on about welcoming creativity and innovation in the workplace like it was a tap people just turned on. I knew that in some circles my creative cup runneth over, however those circles completely vanished under the layer upon layer of rules and general financial orientated oppression of the workplace. I imagine I was not alone, but these things are rarely talked about in open plan offices, or in the home for that matter….

In the last year I’ve realised that concentrating on the moment, and following your intuition is crucial to maintaining a full creative cup. My intuition in the workplace was screaming at me to follow a different path, which had nothing to do with excavating vast tracts of land and measuring how much metal we extracted from it (I was a geologist). I ignored this intuition for years much to my mental detriment. The busier my brain gets; the less attention intuition receives and the more I regress. Meditation is my cure. In the past fortnight, balancing family life, having guests over to stay for a week and working out how to solve various handyman conundrums in multiple houses all at the same time took its toll. All those jobs needed doing, the guests were amazing and so welcome for other aspects of brain nourishment, and my family needed dinner and to play sport. But intuition couldn’t be heard over the din and my creativity fizzled.

The other beautiful morning my intuition tapped me on the shoulder to point out a load of unwelcome plants happily suffocating the veggies and creeping across the paths, so I got stuck into an hour and a half on my knees before I’d had a morning cuppa.

Whilst I was on my knees my meditative thoughts drifted to the fact that these plants never go away. Year upon year of attempted eradication does very little to stem the spring tidal wave of chickweed, grass, cobbler’s peg, onion weed and nut grass, to name a few. I have always been the kind of gardener who did all the weeding all at once (the old addicted me weeded), watered the whole garden in one hit, then I made compost, then did the pruning, then I sowed all the seeds. Quite often I would procrastinate because each task seemed massive before I started and took quite a lot of time. This session on my knees helped me to join a few dots and change my thought patterns around how I deal with this tidal wave.

My recent compost research involving Mr Dowding led me down the path of just composting everything. Good-oh, that makes it a bit simpler, no more sorting out really bad plants from just unwelcome plants, I just need to leave the compost for a good while before use, maybe six months. The garden plan I created means I’m raising seedlings every fortnight in small doses. I’m removing plants that don’t belong as and when I see them, I’m fertilising with homemade worm wee each week, bit by bit. Coupled with my new nocturnal habit of slug removal I’m in a lot more of the garden, in short doses, more frequently, and I’m noticing what goes on a lot more.

Getting to the point of this story, removing the unwelcome plants gave me the mental freedom to realise I am getting the hang of juggling a lot of balls all at the same time keeping everything ticking along, not just hammering one big job after another. It was really rejuvenating to realise juggling all the balls at once in small doses is the way forward. After I had put another layer of onion weed on the compost pile I came back into the house and announced – My Creativity is Back!

Only now I am in the opposite camp of having ideas about videos, stories, workshops, recycling projects all clamouring for brain space and I can’t concentrate on one at a time. My intuition needs more time removing unwelcome plants/ making compost/ creating life to sort it all out.