1 Secret to Experiencing More Potential
After the third weekend in a row preparing the yard and de-winterizing our outside space, I sat back on my haunches. A smear of mud painted my face where I had wiped away the sweat from my brow.
The yard looked so empty! There was no way I put 75 starters and annuals in the ground.
Sitting in the grass, I had to remind myself in about one-month vegetables in an array of colors will polka dot my flower beds and garden pots. Flowers will bloom and vines will creep to the edges blending in the lines of my walkways and rock paths.
Last summer, when the pandemic seemed to have sunk its first bite into us, I experienced the same feelings of doubt. I bought plants to fill my yard and help fight back worry and sadness. Also, to feed my family with minimal trips to the grocery. I have always purchased plants as starters from local community gardens and CSA farmers because a seed packet is just too easy to toss in a drawer and “run out of time” to plant a summer garden. Those scraggly tomato shoots and wilted spinach leaves matched my forlorn attitude about the lonely summer ahead. My yard was like a blank patch of dirt back then, too.
There was also another reason why my yard looked like a cleared slate. Minutes after the 2020 Derecho hurtled through Iowa, many trees were felled and my mature garden was shredded. I feared our neighborhood might never recover.
It only takes three minutes scrolling through my phone’s gallery app to find bundles of photos of me and Sonnet hauling in buckets full of tomatoes and Instagram worthy pictures of dinner plates cooked with swiss chard and oregano and bell peppers harvested from the ground steps away from my back door. Among those pictures are the before and after shots of the neighborhood clean-up last September.
Each image is a declaration of potential.
The ground could not pop those vegetables up by itself. Neither could the home cook create a meal without fresh ingredients. A tree could not reach 100 years old, fall, and be reconstructed into planter boxes and Adirondack chairs without lots of people envisioning a sapling’s potential.
The first step to experiencing potential is to start.
An object in motion stays in motion. A heart leaning into a passion pursues with passion. A muscle moving propels a body forward. A gardener tending plants will harvest flowers and vegetables and herbs at the season’s end.
When I wrote Turning Back the Clock, I promised myself I would not discount any time or lessons learned during our decade’s most difficult year. I challenged each of you to engage, remember, feel, and push through stagnation. When I think about last August, there were empty patches of soil in my life I was unaware even had potential until shoots and sprouts started to spring up.
Driving around Cedar Rapids and sitting on my front porch looking down the lane, brokenness is not what I see. Fluffy green grass is growing faster than we can keep mowed. Seventy-five starters went into rich, turned up soil promising more vegetables than three families could eat in a summer. Parks are clearing up of debris and small yearling trees are taking root to one day shade the future children who come to play.
Yep, all I see is potential.
Are you able to find some open spaces in your life? This week can you turn some attention to the possibilities, till up the soil, experience what grows there?
Like the first plant in a garden, we cannot possibly know what will grow until we dig in and cultivate some roots. Don’t be surprised if you live nearby when a jar of salsa is delivered to your front door this fall. Happy planting!