Emotionally ambiguous spring.
All this spring (as cold and as wet as it is, my emotions have been a grand mixture of "Hooray! I left the house wearing a t-shirt and everything is green and wonderful!" and "Gah! I'm not ready. My front garden bed isn't built yet and the indoor winter projects on the house aren't finished and oh good lord, how is it that the first blooms are already done."
Now I realize that state epitomizes not just my feeling towards gardens but towards life in general. Rocketby has a little over a month left of school, I have a business starting up, Buttercup is getting older and I really have to start engaging her more with challenges to her experience and intellect. We're in a tiny upstate town and I revel in all the beauty and friendliness and ease that comes with being here while still harboring all sorts of anxiety about our big move out of the city, mostly precipitated by my darling husband having regular freak-outs about it. Here I thought that by actually moving we could get past the all that bad feeling about where we should live, instead, there's a whole new layer of doubt over everything. This past Tuesday was such a bad episode that I began to wonder (as the paint in our bedroom is barely dry) whether we'll be here long. I've always wanted to grow hardy kiwis. They are a great vine with one of my favorite fruits and they will survive our frigid winters. The only problem is that they take 7 years to bear fruit. I've never had 7 years anywhere before and deep down I was hoping to have it here, but somewhere in the middle of Tuesday morning in the midst of Steve's meltdown, all I could think is "I guess that means no kiwi for me."
The reality is that we're not going anywhere, unless there was a major opportunity for one of us elsewhere, but we're not even looking for those kinds of opportunities so there is no reason to expect something big to fall into our laps. the reality is that here is good.
What kills me about this is that there have been a string of good days all around Tuesday, yet that one meltdown seems to hold sway over all the other good days combined. It's so vicious - why do we always give faults, mistakes, criticisms, doubts, and failings so much more weight in our lives? We'd be so much more healthy if we could look at eh good and bad clearly. In all this I keep wishing I could be a statistician with beautiful charts of good day/bad days. I wish I could quantify all these messy emotions into clear graceful bar graphs and pie charts. They'd be so much easier to handle then.
Now I realize that state epitomizes not just my feeling towards gardens but towards life in general. Rocketby has a little over a month left of school, I have a business starting up, Buttercup is getting older and I really have to start engaging her more with challenges to her experience and intellect. We're in a tiny upstate town and I revel in all the beauty and friendliness and ease that comes with being here while still harboring all sorts of anxiety about our big move out of the city, mostly precipitated by my darling husband having regular freak-outs about it. Here I thought that by actually moving we could get past the all that bad feeling about where we should live, instead, there's a whole new layer of doubt over everything. This past Tuesday was such a bad episode that I began to wonder (as the paint in our bedroom is barely dry) whether we'll be here long. I've always wanted to grow hardy kiwis. They are a great vine with one of my favorite fruits and they will survive our frigid winters. The only problem is that they take 7 years to bear fruit. I've never had 7 years anywhere before and deep down I was hoping to have it here, but somewhere in the middle of Tuesday morning in the midst of Steve's meltdown, all I could think is "I guess that means no kiwi for me."
The reality is that we're not going anywhere, unless there was a major opportunity for one of us elsewhere, but we're not even looking for those kinds of opportunities so there is no reason to expect something big to fall into our laps. the reality is that here is good.
What kills me about this is that there have been a string of good days all around Tuesday, yet that one meltdown seems to hold sway over all the other good days combined. It's so vicious - why do we always give faults, mistakes, criticisms, doubts, and failings so much more weight in our lives? We'd be so much more healthy if we could look at eh good and bad clearly. In all this I keep wishing I could be a statistician with beautiful charts of good day/bad days. I wish I could quantify all these messy emotions into clear graceful bar graphs and pie charts. They'd be so much easier to handle then.