One Thing We Often Forget About Creating A Masterpiece

For the past few years I’ve been planting vegetable gardens in our yard each spring.

I’m far from an expert, but I’m learning more every year.

Any practical lesson I learn about how to best take care of my plants is almost always a figurative lesson for how to take care of the rest of life.

Those raised beds are teeming with metaphor.

For example, plants thrive with a little direction of where to go, good soil counts for everything, weeds grow more easily than (and not to mention from the same soil that) the good stuff does, and so forth.

One of the best things gardening has taught me is that growing things that are beautiful and healthy is long work.

I don’t mean the days are long, although if this was my full-time job they certainly would be.

I mean that the pace at which it is possible to make changes and see results is slow.

Gardening is something I’ve learned by experiment.

But the interval for my many trials and many errors is longer than I’m used to. As in, you messed this up, and you can try again…next year.

There aren’t tricks I can do to make the peppers get red in 2 hours instead of 76 days.

Scotch tape does not repair a little blooming tomato branch that I broke off trying to get it in the tomato cage.

Participating in a process that I can’t rush is really good for me.

Most things I can speed up at the last minute if I have to.

I can perform some little sleight of hand with the clock or the calendar and still get everything in place on time, or at least have it appear that way.

On the contrary, to plant seeds is to sign up for gratification that’s the opposite of instant.

The end result is months away, and the time it takes to get better and better is measurable in years.

We live in a world where shortcuts aren’t just an option, they’re standard fare.

I am accustomed to immediate analysis of whether or not something was a success, quick and virtual substitutes for connection to others, and easy alternatives for everything from thinking for myself to feeding myself.

And let me tell you.

I Instagram and drive through McDonald’s at breakfast with the best of them and am not arguing that there’s no good place for these things (especially since McDonald’s now serves breakfast all day.)

What I’m getting at is that because the noise of what’s fast and easy and immediate is so prevalent, so ubiquitous, I’m afraid we’ll lose our appetites for things that can only be made by perseverance and hope and imagination applied over a long period.

Again, growing things that are beautiful and healthy is long work.

My garden is a tangible reminder of this.

Often the best work I can do is the work that invests, in some tiny way, in the long view.

I want to be willing to learn a lesson about tomatillo plants that I can’t implement until the next year. To put down good material in my garden beds that won’t really be able to do its job until next season, and the next, and the next.

I want to be willing to remember that because this is the same kind of work that is required by all the important parts of our lives: craft and calling, home and family, relationship and community.

Not quick, not efficient. Slow and steady, and then eventually, I hope, beautiful and good.