Sometimes you just gotta let it die….
Living in New Orleans, you can grow almost anything. It’s pretty much warm for the entire year. Summers can be unbearable but, the mild winters are what dreams are made of. It was sometime in November when I was riding home and stopped by my local garden store. It was probably 70 plus degrees that day without a cloud in the sky. I bought all the greens I could find, and some cruciferous veggies like cauliflower and brussels sprouts.
Let me take a moment to pause right here and say that I am not a “test the ph in the soil” type gardener. I am not meticulous and I do not plan. I plant shit and see if it grows. I tend to my garden for sure, but more than anything I experiment. I watch my plants, I see how they respond. I pay attention. I literally mind my garden.
All of that being said, immediately after getting my winter garden together, the news started preparing us for a deep freeze. Y’all remember when it got frigid cold across wide swaths of the country around mid-December? It was that freeze. Plants left outside would die. And at this point, I had a full garden. Easily upwards of 30-40 plants in containers and a bed I made from an old bookshelf. So I started to plan for the impending cold.
First I took stock of what could stay and what could go. I approached the freeze by harvesting some plants of all their produce. I prepared to move some plants indoors, and took protective measures for the few plants left outside that I still wanted to grow. And finally, I just let some things die. I planned to let quite a few plants, some that I had grown for years, just die in the cold. It was an opportunity to start new.
In terms of size and variety, my garden isn’t even remotely close to what it was before the week of the freeze. But, as I write this, I’m also still enjoying the fruits of the harvest. I made herbal tea blends, I made seasoning blends, I dried other plants for future use. But, this post isn’t really about my garden. This post is more about what I learned from that process that helped me understand some things that were moving in my own life.
The most important lesson is probably obvious. Sometimes, you just gotta let some things die. Literally. Even if those things are familiar and even if they have been with you for years. There was so much to unpack in that moment for me. With the changing of the seasons and moving into the solstice, I was still carrying the memories of some pretty heavy experiences that happened around the same time the year before. I had to make some choices in my life like I did in my garden. Some things didn’t need my energy anymore. Actually, a lot of things didn’t need my energy anymore, and I just had to let them go.
This process of letting go applied to habits and patterns, it applied to what I was eating, what I was listening to, where my attention was placed throughout the course of my day. I’m not sure why clearing out my garden space made me bring my attention to clearing out my emotional and spiritual life, and even my physical space. I couldn’t let certain things occupy my thoughts anymore if I wanted to move forward. If I wanted my life to not just look different but, to be and feel different, I knew I had to start new and move different.
I’m not really trying to speak in some kind of esoteric terms. What I’m saying is sometimes you gotta take stock of what is in your life and intentionally prune things away to get more focused on what it is you actually want. I had to get real clear on the distinction between who I am and who I could be without limiting beliefs and old habits crowding my vision.
Sometimes you just gotta let some things die in your life. But the other part of the process that really blew my mind was that, at the same moment when I was removing things from my life, I also experienced a great harvest.... Insert praise break. So many times we are working, and working, and working some more to the point that we forget to stop, breathe, and just be present. Let’s be honest, sometimes we are working to avoid confronting ourselves, and we neglect the beauty we have grown in our lives.
Gratitude and abundance have been my themes, even after I left so many things behind. As gardeners, we cut away at plants to promote growth. And this same act applied to my life. After the process of elimination, what remained were things that were aligned with the life I saw myself creating. And I don’t mean specific goals like a checklist. I have started asking and answering questions about how I want to feel, what brings me joy, what do I want to occupy my day? Most importantly, I’m giving myself space and time to really answer those questions.
The other part of harvesting is getting to enjoy what I have grown. And being real, real intentional about it too. This is where gratitude comes in for me, instead of constantly chasing toward something that would be replaced by something else to chase, I decided it was time to sit in the moment and enjoy what I have grown in my life. I kept pulling the 9 of Pentacles from my tarot deck over and over, and it resonated. That card is about enjoying the fruits of your labor, it is about fully appreciating the abundance you have created.
I wouldn’t have gotten to this space and made room for new things to grow had I not just let some things die. Letting go has allowed me the opportunity to dream about the possibilities without limits. Wild how all this personal growth started through a forced process of elimination with my plants. But, isn’t that how the universe works?
