CLEARED SPACE - Why Emptiness Allows Growth

"If all space were filled with matter, nothing could move… A type of space can also be filled with all the assumptions you have made in your life. If you go back and remember how your structure of understanding (of what is going on in this world) was built, and how those assumptions have affected your life, you see that a different set of assumptions would have led to a very different life. The ability to understand that you can change your life by changing your assumptions is a kind of “movement.” Allowing for possibility that alternate assumptions may also be useful … emptiness allows for personal growth."

From p67 of Movements of Power by Bob Klein

My garden is rather neglected at the moment to say the least. Partly its due to winter malaise, partly its due to the backlog of other things that have built up over the last nine months of works in the house and partly its due to inclement weather conditions and partly its simply due to it not having been the right time to plant very much.

I did clear various beds in the autumn ready for February planting but as a consequence of my temporary abandonment, those beds – that at other times of the year are overflowing with luscious veggies – have been gradually squatted by nettles.

Now nettles are, on the one hand, an invasive pest that can quickly colonize your garden with huge prickly plants giving you the unpleasant task of removing them. On the other hand, nettles are great at fixing nitrogen in the soil and they attract white-fly keeping them from attacking other plants. You can also seep nettles in water to make an effective pesticide. They can also be used for making a conditioning hair rinse (I promise to give you that recipe soon!) and a good pair of gardening gloves will effectively protect you from their less pleasant aspects.

So my assumption was that I needed tidy bare ground in which to plant my spring seeds. Nature's assumption on the other hand was that bare ground in winter is not a good thing and that it would be far more useful to sow a 'green manure' crop which would nourish and protect both the ground and any annual plants in the vicinity. In a sense we were both right because without my clearing the nettles planted by Mother Nature wouldn't have been so easily able to take hold. As a result my 'structure of understanding' has changed and the garden has almost certainly benefitted.

What can you change in your life by changing your assumptions? Where can you create a form of emptiness that might yield an unexpected and enriching kind of growth?