Stakes

The last few months have been difficult. Lately I’ve found myself reaching frustration paralysis, awaiting outcomes to things that are completely out of my control. I can’t accelerate or delay any of it; I just need to be patient and wait. I’ve never been too good at that, despite convincing others that I am. Maybe they’ve known all along, and have merely been kind or polite about it.

In the past, I’ve done various things to distract myself from this lifelong flaw in my character. Thirteen years ago, I took up running— a fitting allegory then and now. For hours on end, I would hit the pavement or the trail, covering hundreds of miles by the half marathon-ful… never really answering the question if I was running towards something or away from something.

More recently, I took up writing, exploring the notion that putting things down would lighten my load. It didn’t.

This year, after a couple of years off, I obsessively got back into gardening and growing things. I pulled out my grow lights from a box in the garage; I carefully selected some heirloom tomato seeds from a mail order website; I cleaned up my soil beds and bought all the necessary accoutrements of the trade.

I gotta say, I haven’t lost my touch— the garden is looking pretty good.

But like most things, I probably went a little overboard— planted too many of them in too small a space. Crowded the poor little things.

So I pulled a few out— ripped them right up by the roots, and threw them whole into the compost bin. The remaining plants had more room to grow, but pretty soon, I noticed that many of them were falling over.

Stakes. I had forgotten the stakes.

Like most simple things, there was a profound lesson here: the crowded, the crazy, the busy, the chaos… It all holds itself up, it glues itself together. Those crowded plants weren’t really crowded, they were crowdsourcing each other’s strength. They were leaning on their close neighbors for stability.

Of course, the menagerie of plants had been thinned out, something had to be done. So I systematically propped every remaining plant up with a backbone of dead bamboo, tied up with some plastic wrap, trimmed off the bottom leaves, and I’m awaiting my harvest of tomatoes. I guess there’s multiple ways to arrive at an acceptable outcome.

But in the grand scheme of things, and by the way… This season I really won’t know… But maybe the best possible outcome is just letting things happen the way they’re supposed to, or the way they do by chance. Maybe sometimes a couple of branches hold each other up instead of pulling the other down.

There’s a lot of ways to provide support. Sometimes giving a little bit of space works; sometimes it probably just hurts.

Anyway, if anyone needs anything… I’ll be out in the backyard.