Sometimes life feels so fragile, like everything is on the brink of ceasing to exist at every moment. Other times life feels so resilient, like it’s an energy that will never let up. Yesterday I came home to my small balcony garden after two weeks of being away, expecting the worst. What I came home to completely surprised me.
I often feel anxious about my own existence because it feels extremely fragile and abstract. In one of my conversations with my therapist, he said something that reminded me that life wants to exist. That’s why we dream; even when we’re not conscious, our minds want to experience something. There’s comfort in knowing that living things will do everything in their power to keep living.
Since that conversation, I have started to notice how much life wants to exist. From the fact that all animals are wired for survival to the vines and plants that overtake abandoned houses, it’s easy to see that life wants to be.
Now, whenever I have dark thoughts that I interpret as, “I feel like I don’t want to live anymore and maybe my feelings are trying to tell me I shouldn’t exist,” I try to interpret them differently. I think, “I feel like I don’t want to exist right now, but my body, mind, and soul want to exist. My feelings aren’t trying to tell me not to exist, I just can’t understand them yet to figure out what they are trying to tell me.” If I’m part of life and I am wired toward survival, then there must be something deeper that my feelings are trying to get at. Observing life around me helps keep me grounded.
Seeing how my garden handled neglect helped to give me hope.
The Tale of the Urban Garden
While I was away for two weeks, I kept thinking of the small seedings that started out so fragile now handling the elements alone without someone to tend to their needs. I thought of the aphids that seemed so persistent and seemed to multiply exponentially if I didn’t spray them with some DIY solution. I thought about how sad the plants would be if I didn’t bring them indoors every night to shield them from the cold and the critters. I thought about how wilted the leaves became if I forgot to water them regularly, drooping like a sad puppy’s ears.
My heart sank more and more every day that I thought about all the life I helped bring into this world and then cruelly abandoned.
And while I was plagued by these thoughts, my plants THRIVED.
Well, not all of them. Some experimental kale didn’t make it. (It was experimental because I was testing out a planting method that was proving not to work very well so I didn’t set it up for success when I left.) But I wasn’t bummed because all of my other plants were alive.
Not only were they alive, they were huge!
The chard shot up, the broccoli was easily 4x its original size, cucumbers started growing, all of the tomatoes looked healthy, the other veggies and herbs were doing great, and my flowers even started blooming. I was ecstatic!
I was also kicking myself for worrying so much.
In my heart I had already parted ways with my garden. The last day of driving back home I was preparing to see carnage out on the balcony. My brain space was occupied by thinking about what I could have done better, which took away from being able to enjoy the moment many times during that two weeks.
Right after we left I already started telling myself that I should have done better. We hastily put together a self-watering system without having tested it first: four glass bulbs, a bunch of water bottles with holes in the lids turned upside down, and strings leading from root to water container. It was quite the sight. We soaked all indoor and outdoor plants thoroughly just minutes before leaving. We did all that we could.
Yet at the time, it didn’t seem like enough. Life felt like it was hanging on by a thread.
The truth is, anything that is alive will do everything it can to stay that way. While I was afraid the aphids on my cucumber plants would overrun our whole balcony and start trying to break into our house (I hate aphids), nature balanced itself out. What a relief!
On a small scale, life is fragile. I squished caterpillars and sprayed aphids when I got home; they didn’t stand a chance. The kale plant didn’t make it. Previously, one of our finnicky nerve plants didn’t last a few days without me tending to it. Individual life hangs by a thread.
But as a whole, life is resilient. Even though the kale died, the caterpillars were thriving.
The spiders were having a feast.
The butterflies kept dancing.
The bees kept buzzing.
And the garden thrived.
