Yesterday was glorious warm and sunny in Ireland.
I planted an oak tree.
It’s thigh-high with seven large leaves. I put it near another young oak I planted 18 months ago. It’s even smaller, barely to my knees, but thriving.
I hope they’ll meet beneath the ground and be good friends.
I fenced the new tree in, to protect it from the rabbits. For the next century or so, there’s nothing much I can do for it. It needs only my benign neglect.
Let it be.
There’s an acre of land here which — legally — ‘belongs’ to us.
More than 100 trees — many more if you count the thick hedgerows that wrap all four sides of our long rectangle.
Mostly it’s waist-deep grass, bright flowers, unexpected brambles.
Should I tame it? After all, it’s ‘mine’.
I look around. There’s bees everywhere and birds perched on grass stems. Frogs are near the pond and there’s mice in the compost heap. A heron and buzzards pass overhead. Swallows joy ride, feeding on insects rising from the pond.
It is not only my home. Myriad others live here too. They like it exactly how it is, it seems.
I listen to the buzz, song and whispering of life. What right have I to impose control?
In our human world it’s ‘mine’, but the badger who walks through the grass near the apple trees in the middle of the night knows otherwise. The fox does too.
Thousands of living creatures know this place as home. They neither seek my permission nor need my help.
I manage the land a little. I cut a path through the grass to reach the wilds. I weed my pitiable veggie patch. I plant trees.
I do what I need so I can live here too, and leave the rest to those that know better than me what they need.
Can I apply that to my thinking too?
Instead of seeking to control everything that passes through my mind, can I shape and guide the things I need, and let the rest be?
Can I cut paths through the wildness of my mind without taming my wildness into domesticity?
Let that fear be just a fear.
Let that regret be a regret. Let it live its time, then fade away.
That person who I miss with painful intensity will, one day, be a gently joyous or melancholic memory — like scraps in my compost that will either feed the mouse who lives there, or turn into soil.
Is this possible? Desirable? To let my mind be wild and still to live in there?
I don’t know.
The garden encourages me to live amid the multiple facets that make me ‘me’, without the need to dominate or control them all.
I stand by this new tree and say, out-loud (for its a commitment I make): ‘it’s your place now’. I hope it’ll be here for centuries longer than I will.
When all my thinking has fallen silent, birds will sit in this tree and sing to anyone lucky enough to pause and hear.
I’m passing through this place. I listen to the birds, the wind, the gentle come-and-go of thoughts. I’m in the midst of life.