Hi!
It has truly been so long since I have sat down and just typed into a Google Doc. I’ve been really fond of writing poems recently. It’s been a fun new way to process my life in small little pieces. I just created a poem category on the blog which I am excited to add to! Anyway, I am also excited to sit down and talk about my word for the year!
As a preface, I recently started learning to garden. A new hobby I thought would be quite easy. However, I quickly found out it wasn’t as simple as I thought. I started my new garden bed in July and situated it right under a tree. Leading to all of my plants dying due to bugs from the tree or drainage problems. My first season of gardening did not produce any vegetables.
Originally, this frustrated me. I watched countless gardening videos on YouTube, bought books, and asked the employees at my local gardening store for tips. I felt like I had wasted time, money, and effort on something that was supposed to be fun.
However, I did decide to try my hand at gardening again in the next Florida “season.” This time, I moved my garden bed from under the tree and to the other side of the yard. I researched the best plants to grow in Florida during the winter. I bought new soil and put up a net to keep the bugs off the leaves. To put it simply, I tried again. This time with knowledge I gained from my mistakes and from more questions asked and books read.
Today, I picked my first little red tomato from my garden. It’s quite tiny but I am very proud of it!
I didn’t realize when I started this process, but I needed to learn a couple lessons from my little backyard garden.
I learned that you cannot expect to do something perfect the first time. Or second or third or one hundredth. We are not perfect people. It is okay to let yourself learn new things without shaming yourself for not knowing it all. We learn by trying, messing up, and making mistakes. That is how we grow and get better.
By believing that I should have been a professional gardener on my first go round, I was not setting myself up for success. I was setting myself up to be disappointed and discouraged.
I also learned to take a step back when something isn’t working. If a plant isn’t growing, I’ve learned to step back and ask why instead of just feeling stuck in my disappointment or frustration. There have been many times in my own life where I have been unhappy in a situation. And many times where I sat in the unhappiness and thought it would magically fix itself. But unless I made changes, I couldn’t expect things to get better overnight.
So right now, life is weird for me. Post grad life can be lonely, scary, and confusing. It can also be joyful and exciting. It never makes any sense to me and I am very slowly learning to embrace that. I am learning new ways to water my garden when the first way doesn’t work. I am learning to have patience as I grow. When you first plant a seed, it doesn’t fully form over night. It needs patience and love to grow. I am learning to give myself that.
With all this in mind, I have decided my word for the year is going to be cultivate. I want to prepare my garden for growth. In my actual garden (lol) and in my life. I want to be patient and take care of myself and the seeds I have planted. I want to take a deep breath and try new ways when things don’t work out. Even if that sometimes means pulling up the roots and trying again or even planting something new. There are beautiful things to come with time and with prayer. Sometimes life is sunny, and sometimes the rain pours, you need both to grow. I am holding on to that in this new season of my life. And I am thanking God for every beautiful blessing. So as we weather the storms in our lives, I pray that we always look for the sun.
John 1:5: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
All My Love Always,
Annie