The Clumsy Gardener

The seedlings I planted in March were awakened prematurely, I fear. The Mexican Gherkins have begun chaotically spilling their tendrils forward from their potted homes, searching for anything, or anyone, to secure themselves too. The Lemon Cucumbers don’t appreciate the interference. I can feel their judgment toward me, the clumsy gardener who woke them during Fool’s Spring, (at least I think I can.)

This is my first year planting the majority of my garden from seed, and my inexperience didn’t take long to walk up and introduce itself with a goofy grin.

Gardening has already proven to be a great teacher when it comes to life lessons, perhaps most notably how little my expectations and agendas for the natural world actually matter. Learning to let go and adapt has become critical if I want to yield a healthy crop, and I do. My tomato sauce game depends on it, and it’s a strong tomato sauce game; I’ll tell you that much (because it’s true.)

Somewhere along the way, I started to notice how deeply that same instinct lives in me, the urge to plan, to anticipate, to believe I know what something is supposed to become before it’s had the chance to unfold.  

For a long time, that instinct showed up as a quiet search for a chapter of my life where I felt like I truly belonged to something larger, a purpose that aligned me with a calling that felt like home. A place where the inner peace I know I’m capable of, even on the days it feels farther away than Pluto, is met with a quiet inner knowing that says, “this is it, the version of happiness and fulfillment that stays.”

It’s a vision I’ve relied on heavily, something that carried me through the days of searching externally while internally working to rebuild my ability to hope and believe, two channels that once felt completely out of reach during the height of my agoraphobia. I thought I would eventually land in a sense of assuredness, that by now I would have arrived there.

But the more progress I make in my healing, the only truth I feel more certain of is our connection to one another, and strangely, that leaves me feeling unsure. I thought I would know what to do with what I uncovered along the way, only to find that I don’t know what to do at all.

And somehow, contrary to everything I once imagined, that feels okay.

I am learning how to walk into rooms that I once thought would be full but turn out to be empty, and I no longer rush to fix what I think is wrong. I let the truth exist without softening it or trying to reshape it into something else.

There’s an undeniable kind of healing in stepping out of the way, in not forcing hope to fill the space, and simply allowing things to be exactly as they are, even when they’re incomplete, even when they don’t become what I wanted them to be. That feels steadier than chasing an outcome that never lands.

It also makes room for the unexpected, for life to grow in directions I never could have planned, some of which feel like a quiet kind of bliss. I’m reminded of a quote by Julieanne O’Connor, “The sooner we let go of holding on, the sooner we can hold on to the beauty of what’s unfolding before us.”

In my corner of the world, that looks like a greenhouse in the kitchen and a utility shelf in our dining room, both filled to the brim and temporarily housing over one hundred thriving seedlings awaiting their transfer into living Wisconsin soil.

I’ve been assured, via threads on Reddit, that their exuberance won’t lead to a premature death, something I was genuinely fearing as they’ve grown larger, and much faster, than I anticipated. Instead, I’m told not to be afraid, but to hold off on watering to slow their growth.

When I read that, my heart dropped straight into my sneakers. Doesn’t that feel harsh? “Starve the plant babies” is what it might as well have said.

(No, I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.)

And sometimes, it looks like training in a community-based gym that I am unexpectedly obsessed with. I can’t believe I’m typing that. It has become one of the best parts of my day.

None of it arrived the way I thought it would. Not the garden, not my life, not the version of happiness I was so sure I would recognize when I found it.

But things are growing anyway.

Not because I planned them well. Not because I finally got it right. But because I’ve started to step back just enough to let them.

Maybe the lesson isn’t to force the outcome, but to trust something will take root, even if I don’t recognize it at first.

I’m still not watering less.

But I am learning how to loosen my grip, (except on Deadlift Day.)