This season, I’ve done my share of weeding. Hot, dirty work. Weeding proves therapeutic: anyone feeling homicidal or suicidal only need weed for a day to get it out of their system.
It’s easy to incorrectly turn weeding into the wrong metaphor. Quite briefly, I thought myself a heroic Seal eradicating evil from the world as I ripped jungles of weeds from the garden patch. In fact, all that’s happening is the mundane work of gardens.
Gardens by definition are places of human care and cultivation. (Harrison, Robert Pogue.Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. UChicago Press, 2009) What distinguishes them from the wild is their order and selectivity. Weeds just don’t fit into the garden plan usually and they have the whole rest of the outdoors in which to thrive. It’s not that weeds are bad. Or good. They’re just misplaced in the place created by human planting and orderly caring.
What metaphor might work for weeding? A very personal one. I can choose what thoughts and feelings I want to cultivate in my mind and in my body. So, at its best, living too is a human activity of care and cultivation much like everyday gardening.
What’s your weeding metaphor?
“The gardens that have graced this mortal Eden of ours are the best evidence of humanity’s reason for being on Earth. Where history unleashes its destructive and annihilating forces, we must, if we are to preserve our sanity, to say nothing of our humanity, work against and in spite of them. We must seek out healing or redemptive forces and allow them to grow in us.” — Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (UChicago, 2008)