Ready-Made Garden, Ready-Made Relationship

When planting a garden, it is tempting to put in full-sized plants so that your garden is completely filled in as soon as you are done planting.  The problem with this is that very soon, your garden will be overcrowded, and you’ll need to divide and thin many of your plants.  Dividing is hard work, and some plants don’t take too well to being disturbed and transplanted, especially when the root system hasn’t fully been established.  If your garden gets overcrowded too soon, dividing will interrupt the plants’ rooting process, which can take years.  Your plants may appear fully mature on the surface, but underneath the soil, they are still trying to develop their roots.  At this point, the shock to your plants will be great when you divide and thin them.  If you choose not to divide them, the more vigorous plants will choke out the slower-growing ones, undoing much of your original planting.

A gentler approach is to start with smaller plants or seeds, and give them the space and time to grow in and develop. The garden may seem a bit bare for the first year or two, and you may feel unsatisfied or jealous when you compare your garden to others that are fully established.  Given time, your garden will eventually grow to become fully mature and resilient.  When it is time to divide and move your plants around, their roots will be strong enough to handle the shock of change.

It can be tempting to rush a relationship in the same way, especially if we are surrounded by others who are in long-term established relationships.  We may meet someone and want to get serious right away without allowing the roots of the relationship to grow and mature.  It is easy to be impatient with the establishment stage when strong feelings are involved.  Maybe we jump into physical intimacy before we’ve developed trust and emotional intimacy.  We might move in together very quickly, commit to life partnership too soon, or have children right away.  These actions aren’t necessarily fatal to the relationship, but if taken too soon, will complicate things later on.  We may have to backpedal and change certain things: try to get our emotional connection to catch up with the physical one, try to set boundaries with each other after having none, or try to grow intimacy and trust with each other while immersed in the chaos of raising a child.  As with the plants, the shock of these changes is greater when, beneath the surface, our roots are still not fully established in the garden of the relationship.  Growth happens over time in both the garden and in love, so there is no need to rush past the rooting stage of either. 

 

 

Hollywood’s Version of Love Isn’t Very Truthful

It is very difficult to find a Hollywood movie that depicts a truthful relationship.  Most depict relationships in one of two ways.  The first involves two people who fall madly in love, often portrayed through a montage of happy activities set to music (my husband calls this “The A-Team Sequence”).  Inevitably, someone messes up, and then there is a stormy break-up, followed by a period of the silent treatment.  Often, during this stormy broken-up period, one person comes into their power, perhaps by magically starting a successful shoe boutique.  The offender does some soul-searching and realizes what a toad they have been, and comes crawling back, begging for forgiveness.  The movie ends either with their joyous and passionate reunion or with The Wedding Ceremony.  The other type of Hollywood relationship is the one where a couple is the most perfect and loving pair you’ve ever seen, right at the start of the movie.  This usually means that someone is going to get killed or kidnapped.  The rest of the movie involves the remaining partner either wreaking revenge on the killer, or facing the impossible to find and save their lover.

Of course, we don’t see these movies for a dose of reality, but, somehow, they have an impact on our perceptions anyway.  This is likely due to the fact that there just aren’t many models for what a healthy, truthful relationship looks like.  Truthful relationships aren’t very flashy, and would not likely make for great entertainment.  They aren’t always romantic, and often plug steadily along with very little drama.  There is so much more to talk about to friends when you are in an unhappy relationship, which is probably why Hollywood has relied on that formula for so long.

Our own addiction to drama and need for entertainment can drown out the quiet that is necessary to build a truthful relationship.  We may panic if things seem to be moving too slow, or we may worry if we aren’t feeling passionately and madly in love with our partner every second of the day, though underneath the surface, there is a deep love we can tap into.  There is a trade-off that happens when we choose truthful relationships over the Hollywood kind.  We may not get the sweeping romantic gestures all the time, but we know we can trust each other with our vulnerable selves.  We may not always feel worshipped, but we know that we are seen and accepted for every little bit of ourselves, even the ugly parts, and our partner still cherishes us.  We may not always have incredible, passionate, earth-shattering sex, but we do get to have sex that involves a full spectrum of emotions, with a person we know and trust completely.  We may not always get to hear just how wonderful and amazing and perfect we are, but we can count on getting the entire truth, no matter what that is.  In Hollywood, there is glamour and glory, but the attention span is incredibly short- not a good basis for the long run.

Other post you might find interesting:

Asking Your Partner for What You Want

 

Unsticking from the Wall- A Leap of Faith

I have only gone rock-climbing once in my life, and that was enough for me.  My siblings adore this activity, so they introduced it to me one year at Joshua Tree.  When I reached the top of my first wall and it was time to come back down, I felt completely stuck.  I was roped in, and my brother was belaying me and encouraging me to start my descent by bouncing my feet against the wall on the way down.  I believe his words were something like, “C’mon now Elyn, hoppy, hoppy, hoppy!”  As non-threatening as his description was of my task at hand, I was terrified.  I clung to the wall, hoping that I could magically find myself back down on the flat earth, without having to do the letting-go part.  Of course, there was no alternative- cling as I might, I had to let go at some point, or I would never come down off that wall.  My legs were willing to do the “hoppy” part, but my hands just did not want to trust the rope, or my legs, or my brother.  They gripped the rock as if my life depended on it.  Eventually, I forced myself to unclench my fearful hands, and allowed my trusting self to relax into my harness. This was an exhilarating moment for me- a triumph of trust over fear.

There are times in our lives when we are faced with a similar choice: remain stuck by clinging fearfully to what we know, or move forward into the unfamiliar and scary unknown.  The price of being stuck eventually becomes so high that we are willing to take the risk of making a change.  It could be that we have been working at a job that we know how to do in our sleep, but which is mind-numbingly boring.  We might be afraid that if we pursue our passion, we will fail and become demoralized.  At some point, though, we may become so incredibly tired of the stuck feeling that it is worth it to us to take that risk and foray into the unfamiliar.  Suddenly, there is movement where we never imagined, and the joy of our triumph over fear is reward enough.    

 

  

The Emotional World Is Not Flat, Either

Sometimes, we act as if the world of our emotions is flat, a two-dimensional sort of place.  We may very badly want something to turn out a particular way.  That desired outcome stands in the future, on the edge of a flat world.  We picture it turning out the “wrong” way, and believe that we will then fall off the edge of the earth, life will end, we will cease to exist.  Perhaps we are afraid of not getting something we want: a job, a baby, a certain partner.  Maybe we are afraid of losing something we have: a job, a baby, a certain partner.  Either way, there are certain outcomes we are not willing to open up to as even remotely possible, and we brace ourselves against these possibilities with all of our might.  Sometimes, we live in so much fear of loss, that we don’t even know what we have, while we have it.

Occasionally, even though we have braced ourselves against it, we still lose what we thought we could never live without.  I remember going through a particular break-up when I was younger.  I had come to depend on this person- let’s call him Jack- for things that I really needed from myself.  I spent much of the relationship feeling fearful about my own world falling apart if it ended.  When Jack left, the end was not nearly as awful as the anticipation and fear had been.  Over time, I began to discover things about myself, my own potential, and the world around me.  An exciting chapter in my life started to unfold.  Had the relationship continued, I would probably have let my full internal potential continue to be eclipsed by my fear of future external loss.

When a feared loss comes to fruition, we may feel devastated at first- and we need the time to feel the devastation, and mourn our loss.  Eventually we discover that we didn’t fall off the face of the earth after all.  We are still here, and life is still going on. Mourning our loss was excruciatingly painful, but we are still alive- even without that which we thought made life possible.   It may take a while to re-orient ourselves to a new life, but at our core, there is still something solid inside of ourselves to hold on to. When we tap into that solid part of ourselves, we plant the seed of meaning that will grow from the pain of our loss.    

 

 

The Botanical Revolutionary

The first place I lived after college was Eugene, Oregon- a town with many unusual but endearing characters.  One day, my roommate came home and said, “I met this funny guy. He calls himself a botanical revolutionary, because he likes to plant dandelion seeds in sidewalk cracks and perfect lawns.”  As coincidence would have it, months later I moved into an apartment and discovered that this “botanical revolutionary” was my downstairs neighbor.  He was a big guy named Todd with dreadlocks, a huge smile, and a Jersey accent. If you met him, his dandelion-planting scheme would make complete sense- here was someone devoted to throwing a monkey-wrench into the world of seeming perfection and order.  Not someone you could possibly tame, and sometimes, someone who might drive you a little crazy, but all the same, pure at the core.

There are times when we could all use a little botanical revolutionary in our emotional world.  We might wish that things in life would be neat and orderly, like a perfectly weed-free putting green.  We may spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to make life cooperate with our need for perfection, order, and predictability.  Then something comes up that rumples up our smoothness.  It could be that we are taking a relationship for granted, and then our partner comes to tell us that something needs to change, now, because the relationship is in danger.  Perhaps we have a financial plan, and there is a setback- a car accident, a market crash, a job loss.  Maybe a health issue pops up and forces us to stop moving forward.  It could be that we are preparing for a race, and we pull a hamstring.  

Imagine that all of these moments are brought to us by a mischievous and comical dreadhead, tiptoeing around with his dandelion seeds, and giggling as he plants them in our putting green.  As dandelions pop up in the green, it may no longer be so uniformly perfect; at the same time, we can relax a bit and not feel so frightened about messing it up anymore.  

  

Avoiding Issues by Trying to Ignore Them: Denial and the Thumb

One day, I was washing a window, which is an activity I don’t much care for.  I was in a big hurry to be done with it.  Suddenly, the window fell onto my thumb and I was stuck. For a moment, I went straight into denial, took the cloth from my trapped hand and continued to scrub with my free hand.  In my mind, I was hoping that the issue would resolve itself if I ignored it.  Obviously, it did not, and I eventually had to open the window and face the pain that was in my future.  Also, I had to accept that I wasn’t going to be done with the window washing as quickly as I’d hoped.

There are times when we are trucking along in life and then meet an obstacle which threatens to hamper our momentum.  We may wish to ignore the obstacle, but the fact remains that it is standing there in front of us.  Perhaps we meet someone new, and we jump into a relationship with that person.  It seems to be headed in a good direction, so we get attached.  Then, we come across a conflict, and we just want to ignore it because it was going so smoothly until now.  Usually, we want to ignore the conflict because we are afraid this means that the relationship will end, or isn’t what it seemed to be in the first place.

If we ignore the obstacle that is demanding our attention, it won’t go away.  We are going to have to deal with it at some point.  Even the best relationships involve conflict, and a good approach is to deal with it as soon as possible.  If I had left my thumb in the window for too long, I wouldn’t have been able to do much but clean the same area in front of me, and my injury would have gotten worse as the blood flow to my thumb was cut off.  If a conflict arises in a relationship and gets ignored, you are guaranteed that it will become more complicated as time goes by.  The sooner you address it, the sooner you can resume trucking.

A Plant in the Wrong Conditions

The other day, I walked past a garden alongside a building.  There was a beautiful, single yellow iris blooming against the wall, but barely visible because there was a giant bush in front of it.  This seemed tragic to me.  Here, this gorgeous flower is baring itself to the world, but hardly anyone will see it.  It probably gets very little sun or water, so it won’t spread and grow as well as it could if it were in the right place.  I felt tempted to dig it up and take it home with me, so that I could plant it in a spot where it might thrive.  At the same time, I am aware that this plant may not have enough of an established root system to survive such a sudden move.  If I were to kidnap a plant, I would need to make sure of this sort of thing first.

There are times in life when we are like this yellow iris.  Maybe we were born into a family that didn’t recognize or value our strengths, so we learned to squeeze ourselves into roles that gives us very little room to grow and thrive.  Perhaps we are in a relationship that isn’t giving us the space to fully be ourselves, and so we don’t express much of our truth. We might be stuck in a job that does not reward our talents, and slowly we numb ourselves just to get through the days.    

If we look inside ourselves and learn just what it is that we need in order to thrive, we will start to recognize the areas in our lives that feel constricting.  When we do this, it may be tempting to uproot ourselves immediately- quit the job or dump the partner. If we do this in a knee-jerk way, without building our own internal resources, we may end up floundering rather than thriving.  Rather than just uprooting ourselves when we are uncomfortable, we can strengthen our relationship with ourselves first.  By feeding our internal needs first, we strengthen our root system, so that we can survive a transplant. This way, we will become strong, with more of ourselves to hold on to when it is time to make the move to an environment where we can thrive.

Rawhide for Water

The other day, our dog Maude was walking around with a rawhide clenched in her teeth.  She walked over to her water bowl, and clearly wanted a drink, but was unwilling to drop the rawhide to get the drink.  She was holding on to it out of fear of losing it; a fear that comes from the days when we had two dogs.  Our other dog, Liver, was a bully and a bit of a hog, and she died fairly recently.  Maude hasn’t fully adjusted to the reality that no one will ever beat her up over a rawhide again. When I gently took it from her mouth, she immediately ran to her water bowl and eagerly drank up the water.  If I hadn’t intervened, eventually the price of her thirst would have outweighed the fear of losing her rawhide to a resurrected Liver, and she would have opted to take the risk, so that she could drink.

Often, we hold on to old patterns that protected us in the past from something or someone scary, long after the fact.  These old patterns or behaviors may now hold us back from what we want, but we hang on to them so that we feel safe.  At some point, the price we pay to hold on to safety becomes higher than the price of facing our fears.  Perhaps we learned to be stoic because we got hurt in the past, and we gripped our feelings inside a clenched heart.  If we want to have connection with another person, eventually we need to unclench our hearts and let some difficult feelings out.  It may be scary, and it shouldn’t be rushed, but when we do so, we can drink in the love of another.

A Compost Miracle

I recently switched my composting to a tumbler, from an open pile.  The old open pile is mostly decayed, and pretty tall.  In the fall, we couldn’t keep up with the volume of potatoes we’d gotten from our farm share, so some of them got tossed and left for dead. Or so we thought.  Recently, I noticed that there is a large potato patch growing in the old pile.  I’ve decided to let these potatoes grow, and see what sort of harvest will appear later this summer.  These plants certainly will get quite a nutrient-rich diet in their very tall bed of organic matter.

The abandoned potatoes are like some of the “mistakes” we make in life, that we may judge as wastes of time and energy.  Some of our most fertile lessons come from making mistakes.  We all have an internal composter, whether we know it or not. When we do something that we wish we hadn’t, there is no point in trying to go back in time to rewrite our history. Spending too much time in remorse and self-recrimination is not productive, either- it is similar to hoping that compost will decay in a landfill. Instead, we can acknowledge and understand our mistake, then allow that understanding to break down the shame we might have.  When we allow the mistake to “decompose” in ourselves, wisdom will grow from the decay. 

 

 

Zacatecas!

Near my neighborhood, I often used to see a man pushing an ice cream cart with the word “Zacatecas” painted on the side.  I just assumed that “Zacatecas” is Spanish for “ice cream.”  One day, I was having ice cream with a friend and his father.  His father only speaks Spanish, so I excitedly pointed at my ice cream and exclaimed, “Zacatecas!!!!”  He looked perplexed, and asked my friend something:  “My dad wants to know if you are asking him where he is from in Mexico.”  This, of course, puzzled me until I learned that, rather than meaning “ice cream,” Zacatecas is a state.  Imagine someone eating with you who speaks no English.  Suddenly, she points excitedly at an item of food and shouts, “California!”  I felt rather silly, realizing this is what I had just done.  Luckily, my friend and his father both were very sweet about it, and we all had a good laugh together.

Sometimes, we may be mistaken in our understanding of another’s reality, whether due to a language barrier, a cultural difference, or just a difference in personalities.  In my opinion, every relationship is a coming together of different cultures, even if you are from the same place.  If we have good intentions, then making blunders can be a way to learn about others.  Sometimes, we can be so worried about looking stupid, that we say or do nothing.  This may make us feel safe in an unfamiliar situation, but we won’t learn anything by doing this.  If we can give ourselves permission to make our well-intentioned blunders, and if we also give others permission to do the same, we can broaden our understanding of the things we are unfamiliar with.  And maybe get some good laughs out of it all. 

 

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