Stillness {Day 7}: Go Pull Some Weeds

When I cannot bear outer pressures anymore, I begin to put order in my belongings... As if unable to organize and control my life,  I seek to exert this on the world of objects.  -Anais Nin

Post-vacation life piles up around me.  Laundry, receipts, a week's worth of mail to be sorted and an empty fridge all silently pass judgement on my lack of productivity, my failure to make any concrete progress.

The kids are funny.  They don't register the chaos - they register only that the sun has returned, and mudpies are waiting to be made, and buddies up the street are welcoming them back home.  Friends swirl in and out of the house, and happy shouts of This time I'M Emperor Palpatine!!! ring out from the treehouse.

I felt the panic rise all week - no forward progress, no measurable improvement in the general upheaval that is our house.  The bills, when opened, don't help to calm frazzled nerves.

So I went outside.

Stood out on my walk and irritatedly reviewed the overgrown post-summer foliage.

I pulled up a dead tomato plant.  Then another.  I pulled on the end of a morning glory vine and ended up with two armfuls of twisted dying plant.  I bent at the hips and got right to the root of a perennial daisy. Out it came.  Plant after plant, clods of earth exploding overhead, I pulled out festering old roots, snaking choking vines, and snapped brittle branches one by one.

There is nothing to be done about the weight of tasks that loom over us, day in and day out.  One must simply plod through the laundry, the bills and the contractor meetings. 

But sometimes, the only way to get to Still is to go out and exert control over one tiny corner of your world.   Tidy the garden.  Ready it for the quiet winter season. 

Sometimes, the most direct path to a small corner of Stillness is the path of action. 

Go. Pull some weeds.