Nothing Growing

I’ve had a disastrous six months on the terrace with my veg growing. I would put it down to suddenly finding myself in such reduced territorial circumstances if it weren’t for the fact that P has had as spectacular a time horticulturally as mine has been miserable - producing a dazzling array of baby avocado trees, figs and palms. So evidently I need to look a little further for the cause of my under-performance.

Off the top of my head, the nearest I can get to the root (!) cause is stress. Its not that I have been running round like a headless chicken (sorry Mrs Black!) but rather I don’t feel I’ve really been focussing - particularly on my plants but on other things as well. That’s not to say its been a period when I haven’t achieved anything but perhaps, rather, that what I have achieved has been so at the expense of other things rather than in harmony with them.

What I’ve discovered is that when I feel one part of my life is not going the way I want it to - in this case, my creative work - instead of keeping it in perspective by maintaining a balance of alternative occupations, I quietly obsess about this one thing - putting huge amounts of mental energy into worrying and fretting and gradually abandoning more and more of the other activities in my life that would (as Julia Cameron calls it in the Artist’s Way) “fill my well”.
In gardening terms this is the equivalent of having a flower bed full of stunning blooms and choosing to focus on only the one plant that is languishing to the point of which you neglect to water, prune and feed all the rest. Obviously by the end of a year there will be more than one plant ailing - if indeed there are any left alive at all!

So my summer solstice resolution - if I can be so bold as to make one in the middle of the year - is to get back to being a balanced-all-round sort of person. I’m going to take care of the whole flowerbed so, hopefully, the general well-being of the rest of the plant community will help the ailing one to take a firmer hold.