Count Your Blessings #123 – Pottering in the garden

I work as a technologist. My life is spent around the latest and greatest gadgets, information technology, computation, storage, wireless and all manner of things that are changing our lives. Sometimes it’s a bit like working in a reality distortion field, the stuff I am doing isn’t yet real life.

When I’m not at work I still like to use the technology (which is why I’m writing a blog), but I also like to reconnect with the real world. One way of reconnecting that I return to again and again is to potter in the garden.

There is something very cathartic about getting your hands dirty.

I try not to have an agenda when I go out, work is run by agendas, pottering requires no agenda. It always amazes me how much I find to do without an  agenda. The garden looks OK, and will probably stay looking OK without me doing anything, but having ventured out and invested some time I can see a real difference. See a job – do a job, nothing more complicated than that.

A  while ago I watched a series in which the TV Gardener Monty Don took a number of young people with drug problems through a programme that tried to reconnected them with the land. I’m not sure how successful Monty would say that the series was, but I could relate to where he was aiming.

There is something about tending the land, pottering in the garden, that connects with something deep inside me. Perhaps it’s because I used to spend hours down on the allotment with my Dad, or perhaps it’s something more fundamental than that. Perhaps it’s something deep in our very fabric.

There is something about mowing the lawn that surfaces all of my frustrations, I have no idea why. The inner conversation is often quite angry, but having been surfaced, the frustrations are normally gone, left in the pile of clippings in the compost bin.

Today I jet-washed the patio, it’s not a task that can be rushed, it takes as long as it takes. You kind of have to find the rhythm to be successful. It does me good to be in a rhythm, I prefer to be rushing, but it’s much better for me when I’m walking to a beat.

I always feel blessed after a few hours in the garden.

I would loved to have seen the Garden of Eden, I’m expecting to see something even better one day. I wonder whether it will need us to potter in it? I wonder whether we will feel the need to potter in it?