• In the Garden

Saturday, July 19, 2008

The Zen of Weeding

posted by Terry OShaughnessy at 12h31

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Survival of the fittest: a Scottish thistle resists weeding (Photo by Terry O'Shaughnessy)

“Crouch, bend, pull, throw—crouch, bend, pull, throw.” It is the mantra of weeding, and as mantras go, it’s pretty effective.

These days, my garden is rioting with growth, flourishing with flowers, but roaring with weeds. And these aren’t just any weeds. These are the mother of all weeds: intricate, huge and pulsating with life. They are evolving into other things. They have thorns, and stingers and leak with strange otherworldly liquids. They are Origin of the Species weeds—Darwinesque in their ability to grow whole new limbs overnight and survive anything, and they were taking over. So there was only one thing for me to do, seeing it was now Survival of the Fittest: weeding. Weeding all day. With gloves and shears and shovels.

At first, I was irritable, and started pulling weeds out haphazardly with brute force. Then I got into the rhythm: the “crouch, bend, pull, throw” action which worked for a while, but started to kill my knees. So I got on all fours—and that, too, worked for a time. But when I started to get lightheaded from leaning forward, I had to stop. Surveying the nicely cleared, de-weeded patch in the garden, I felt odd satisfaction, however, and wanted to keep going. So I sat down on the grass and continued to weed with one hand, slowly, and methodically. And that’s when it happened. A zen-like calm descended.

First, irritability lifted and left my brain. Then everything I had to do that day filtered through, was examined, and discarded into the weed pile. I noticed that there was now actually very little going on in my grey matter—a state of mind I recognized only too well from (many) other occasions. Soon, there was literally nothing in my head except the pleasant instruction of “lean comfortably, pull weed, throw into pile, start again.” Complete calm entered my entire self. “This must be Zen,” I thought—then let that go too.

There was one weed too majestic to cut down, though, a giant thistle. And since I have enough Scottish DNA to know that it matters, it still lives in my yard. The butterflies seem to like it, and its purple spiky flowers are enough to put you in mind of homemade shortbread cookies and perhaps a small glass of single malt, taken neat. For restorative purposes after all that hard physical labour of weeding, you understand.