Your Life Is a Garden

How to improve your life through trying times

This series is written to guide myself, and you, the reader, through the challenges of our lives while staying open, engaged, adaptable, and full of wonder. It’s a therapeutic approach, woven with my own creative musings, to figuring out how to improve our lives in the landscape of today’s world. I hope you will join me as I venture into the images, senses, and pathways that might offer us nuggets of wisdom that can support us through the gifts and hardships that we are faced with. Please comment, ask questions, and use the therapy tools that I’ll add at the end of each post. Welcome to your bounty!

Your life is a garden. There is the land on which it was formed. There’s the soil that cups the seeds that are planted there, and the fertilizer that is brought in to help the seeds grow. There are seasons that guide the harvests, droughts, freezes, and sprouts. Elements like water, temperature, sunshine, and wind all affect what happens in its ecosystem. Your garden gets visitors - some which support your garden’s bloom, like bees and butterflies, and some which feed off your garden, like aphids.

To keep your garden growing and thriving, it requires your attention, your care, and your skills. It asks you to get your hands in the dirt, to tend to its flowers and vegetables and leaves. It means you have to replant things sometimes, or trim them back, to give them the best conditions for growth. Sometimes you have to pull the weeds.

Your garden is also your sanctuary - the place that you can sit and feel a summer breeze, or listen to birdsong, or watch butterflies flutter over its vibrant hues. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as seeing sprouts break through the soil, to witness a new leaf unfold, or buds uncurl into fragrant pillows of petals. Your garden feeds you - you pick apples from its branches, and pull beets from its roots. You are nourished by its bounty, you find rest among its grass.

In your life’s garden, you experience the richness of all that life offers, the pain of all that it takes, and the challenge of all that it asks from you. But it’s yours.

• Journal prompts:

• What do you imagine when you are thinking about the garden of your life? Are there images, sounds, sensations that come to mind?

• What feelings do you have when you think about tending to your life’s garden? Fear? Apprehension? Excitement? Name them all without judgment, just observation.

• What do you think it means to tend to your garden? To improve it's lifespan through love, consistency, and adaptation?