A Lesson In Patience

Where I live there is an extra season squeezed in between winter and spring. It's called Mud Season. It is that time when the five feet of snow that has been gracing your yard has finally all melted, and April Showers takes on a whole new meaning. I devoted a whole chapter of my ebook, "Staying Rooted" (available on Amazon.com) to this subject. Even though the temperature may taunt and tease you with days up in the high 60's and maybe even an occasional 70, it can just as easily fall back down into the 30's over night, with a snow shower thrown in just so Mother Nature can remind us frail humans who is really in charge.

For a frustrated gardener like myself, especially one who has been longing for a real yard to garden in again after 15 years of container gardening on my front porch, the seemingly endless winter that just passed was agony made worse by the fact that unless you own a pair of good garden boots, or "Wellies" as my British girlfriend used to call them, you can't even venture off the concrete path or driveway let alone even think about planting anything. Even yard clean up has to be parceled out to those few days that are warm and dry unless you enjoy sinking up to your ankles in mud.

If I have learned anything at all from all my years of gardening, I have learned the value of patience. Any time I rush ahead to satisfy some childish tantrum, an "I want it now" kind of ego trip, the results are a disaster. All the jumping up and down in the world will not make the tulips, daffodils or crocus come up any faster. It will all come to pass when the optimal conditions are there.

How many times in our lives have we rushed into a situation without taking the time to weigh all of the pros and cons only to be disappointed, or worse, with the outcome? That guy you thought was "the one" that you moved in with after only a few months? The job that you were sure was going to be your career forever? The move across the country that left you feeling alone and adrift in a sea of strangers? I'm not advocating not going after your dreams. If  you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that I am a one-woman cheering section for following your bliss, but any time I didn't balance the desires of my heart with a clear understanding of what I was getting into, I was always disappointed.

It's easy to pull out a dead plant and put in another one. It's a whole lot harder to have to restart your entire life. Mother Nature is the best teacher in the art of learning patience that I have ever seen, and we would do well to take the time to listen to the lesson and watch how beautiful the world is with the results once we have learned it. Even if you have to go out and buy a new pair of boots so you can function while you wait for better weather, it beats getting stuck in the mud every time!

And so it is.