Today’s lesson in gardening is a lesson for life.

Every year as spring arrives, I’m faced with the daunting prospect of cleaning the entire yard of winter wreckage and rot. This usually takes about 40 to 50 filled lawn bags, and as I step into the yard with the first bag in hand, I always think it’s an impossible task. For years, this gave me hesitation, and it was often difficult to even begin the process because the idea of filling even ten bags seemed insurmountable. My mind was creating an impasse before I even began filling one bag, and I would look around at the yard, which normally felt small and manageable, and think it was endless. 

For a few years, I tried to trick my brain into embracing the process. At that time in my life, I was accustomed to having a constant stream of sound fed into my head – earphones (this was long before the earbud), stereos, sound systems – they kept my head filled with music, but looking back, no matter how fierce a Madonna song might have been, it was all just noise. Like most of us, I was once uncomfortable in silence. The yearly yard-clean-up was my enforced return to quiet and stillness, and though it was jarring at the onset, after a few hours I felt the relaxed ease into a more natural state of quiet – the way the body will often return to its natural calm. This method worked, as my yard cleaning became a sort of meditation that drowned out the chaos of the rest of the world, and the noise that ran about in my head. It till has that effect, and I still worm my way into a meditative state after a few hours of outside work, but there is a greater lesson that translates into everyday life.

Over the last couple of years, whenever I felt the seemingly impossible expanse of yard work looming impassable in my path, I would stop my brain from its automatic resistance to the totality of the operation, and simply focus on the very next step ahead of me. The idea, and very real impossibility, of filling 40 lawn bags on that first day of clean-up is not an idea anyone can overcome. However, I could easily fill one or two, or even five bags, at a single time, and that’s what I trained my brain to focus on – not the totality of the process, but the very basic first step. It was a freeing moment, because I also understood that the barrier to beginning was only in my head, and since then I’ve applied the process to any challenging situations that at first feels too formidable to conquer. Very rarely do our greatest accomplishments happen in one fell swoop – anything worth completing is going to take time and effort, and likely repeated attempts and trials, but if we distill it to one manageable step at a time, everything becomes possible. 

Baby steps. 

Because sometimes babies aren’t that stupid. 

Much like this crocus, which I almost missed entirely, the Lenten rose has come into bloom without fanfare or announcement, so I almost missed it, given the late date of my garden examination and clean-up. Happily, the blooming season of the Hellobores is rightfully renowned for its duration, even if it has been known to bloom through the snow at precisely the point when it’s likely to be missed. 

I finally got around to start the yard cleaning, and I was on my fifteenth lawn bag or so of leaves and branches and debris when the sight of this Lenten rose stopped me in my tracks. Maybe it was the sunlight glinting through its pink petals, or the surprising warmth of the day, but it felt like I was seeing it for the first time – and I heard the universe whispering in stern voice to pause and take in the spring days, even when they feel dreary.

The wintry rush that formed the bulk of April had me wanting to hurry into May, but the laws of science have it that an object in motion tends to stay in motion – and if the motion is increasing, it’s more and more difficult to slow things down. We will want the days to slow to a leisurely trickle come summer, and this is the time to start practicing that.