I pulled weeds this past weekend. I haven’t
noticed many other neighbors involved with their piece of earth in this way,
just me. I don’t believe that those around me have conspired to direct all of
the seeds of these unwanted sprouts to my yard. Sometimes it just seems like I
need to pull weeds out of my yard.
It is a lot easier to see that my neighbor Joe
needs to tend to his yard, I can really see his weeds. I could tell him how to
take them out of his yard and all of the benefits he would have if he would do
the hard work. Joe hasn’t asked me though.
I thought about hiring someone else to pull my
weeds. I would not have gotten dirty and I could have gotten the benefits of
weed pulling without the deliberate painful bending over, kneeling, squatting
and sweating. There would have been no pain to my weed pulling, just the
gratification of looking at a tidy yard. This approach would have cost me money
and I would not have appreciated the effort required to have a garden with no
weeds, so I just did it myself.
I have been looking at “weeds” in my life as
well. I have one particularly ugly weed that has been in my soul’s garden since
I was a teenager. No one pointed it out to me, I am the only person that really
sees it; Joe certainly hasn’t pointed it out to me. I have been trying to
figure out how to get rid of it without all of that sweating and grunting. I
think that it will take a lot of work and I am sure I am going to have to use
muscles that haven’t been used in a while.
Sometimes weeding requires a little help. Yes,
someone that has expertise with the types of weeds that clutter my otherwise
lovely garden. I don’t want to go through all of this work and then have the
weed come back again like dandelions do. No, I think I will hire a master
gardener, or better yet he may help me along for free. He is very committed to
weeding men’s gardens. He works on his garden consistently, he believes it is
necessary. He won’t let me rationalize the possibility that it may not be a
weed but just a somewhat unattractive flower. He calls a weed a weed, my friend
does.
I will work on removing my weed. I will be
encouraged by my friend, the master gardener, and I will have to grunt and
stretch and sweat all the way through. My gardener friend says that it is
really the only way to have a garden of contentment. I will work because my
strongest desire is to have a contented garden. Then, my family, my friends and
yes, even I will be able to sit and enjoy all that my hard work has brought.