NATURE DOES NOT HURRY, SO WHY ARE WE ALWAYS IN SUCH A RUSH?
Nature knows exactly what’s its doing.
One thing gardening and growing vegetables has taught me is patience. For a Taurean woman this is not an easy feat; patience is definitely not my virtue.
Having two children and being a teacher and coach for 25 years has without a doubt improved my patience but gardening is where I would learn my biggest lessons.
Lao Tzu has been quoted as saying, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” Never a truer word has been spoken. You see the amazing thing about nature is, it knows exactly what’s its doing; it’s been doing it for millions and millions of years. Things always seem to get stuffed up when us humans try to intervene and tell it what to do. It would do so much better if we just got the hell out of its way and let it carry on.
The amazing thing about being a gardener and urban farmer is that the environment always wins. Once I truly understood this and trusted the force and allowed myself to be a living organism amongst the wider picture, things just became so much easier. When things appeared to go wrong according to my ‘human brain’, I would have far less angst because I just accepted that this was meant to be.
Everything has a cycle in nature and a wider purpose. Essentially in its simplest form; everything is born, lives for a period of time, dies and goes back into the soil only to start it’s cycle once again.
If we try to bend or shape it into something different, try to extend it unnaturally or try to make something that isn’t supposed to be there, we not only rewrite future, we also potentially break a natural cycle that has been fulfilling its purpose for millions of years. It’s not our “right” to try to meddle with it, just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.
It’s often hard to see everything in the garden as having a purpose for good. Weeds are such a pain and pest can sometimes destroy an entire crop. Trust me, I honestly get the heartache. It’s hard to show love and compassion to the aphid and let the wayward grass have its way.
What if I said that nature has not designed anything without a grand purpose in mind, that every pest and weed actually serves a purpose and is in fact your greatest indicator of what’s truly going on in your garden or on the farm.
Weeds are in fact a healing agent, like a band aide on soil that is damaged or unhealthy. It acts as a scar and helps to heal the soil, adding back the nutrients it’s starved of. When a bare patch of dirt presents itself, nature spontaneously calls out to a ‘weed’ to fill the spot and add to the ground nutrients, to send tap roots down to open up the soil like a capillary system and bring back healthy fungi and bacteria to the once lifeless dirt, transforming it into soil once again. It’s actually your friend.
Patience my friend; let nature do its job.
Pests are in fact starting to break down the plant that is actually in ill health, most likely because the soil below has been mistreated and is starved of healthy fungi and bacteria. The pests are there to in fact speed up the composting cycle because they know that the soil needs that plants nutrients back in the ground to be composted. If the soil was healthy and the plant planted next to a happy companion, then the pests probably wouldn’t show up unannounced.
Patience my friend; let nature do its job.
Have you ever wondered why a rainforest appears to thrive without any human intervention? You can go into the deepest recesses of the Daintree Forest where there are no ranger paths and sit quietly and observe that nature has this thing completely under control. Amongst the apparent chaos of plants growing along each other, trees falling down all the composting, insects building homes and water ways finding their own course, nature is actually thriving. It’s beautiful.
Well it’s because it has no clock attached to its purpose – it just is and will do its thing for however long it takes. Each plant, species and living creature just trusts in the process. Our greatest lesson currently to take away from these superior beings is perhaps to have a greater respect for time, to not rush and want to speed up everything, to just let things be and learn to live amongst the wider community in greater harmony and know that we are all important in the grander scheme.
