Some of the more astute of you might realise, that while we were wrestling with the intricacies of interviews; (I must try and break my addiction to alliteration – but I digress!); in the middle of it we sort of disappeared for a month or so.
The reason is not difficult to understand; Trish has been comprehensively overworked, and I have been fighting off the effects of a rather nasty bout of bronchitis.
When I returned to the blog, my focus was on completing the Interview project and I had little time for anything else. This was until this weekend past when, with a sense of release, I reconnected with my garden.
My garden suffered considerably in the aftermath of the Queensland floods; but it seemed a little selfish to bewail its fate when so many others were facing far worse consequences. Then I was laid low with illness, and the garden has been very much left to itself.
However, while I was struggling to make sense of X, Y and Z in job interviews, things have been happening in the garden. Taking advantage of slightly drier conditions, the husband dragged me out to see what needed doing before the weeds took permanent control.
Just walking in the garden brought me a new awareness. Gone was the warm, dense humidity hanging like a curse in the air. Instead there was a light touch of cooling breeze that stirred the new growth on the trees we had mourned for. When did that happen? Everywhere I looked I could see the start of new growth, and what had been dead sticks of wood were now showing a haze of green as new growth springs from the ground. The garden is alive again, and I never even noticed it changing.
The seasons do the same thing here; lacking the dramatic shift through the amazing colours of autumn, we can pass from the hot and humid summer almost unnoticed into the cooler mornings which announce winter is on its way. The change is so organic that unless we look for and monitor each day that passes we reach the winter with barely a surface ripple.
And that is the lesson that my garden taught me this weekend. Change is not always dramatic; and we don’t need a magic wand with the words abracadabra and a puff of green smoke. Sometimes change creeps upon us; unnoticed and unheralded – but just as certain and probably more lasting.
As a side effect of this illness, my recovery has been blighted with depressing setbacks; and sometimes I have felt that I would never be well again. I am not normally given to such morbid thoughts, and I decided that I would have to look to my positive thinking and positive actions to create a more optimistic view of life. But it has been a hard slog; and I began to wonder if, for the first time in my life, it was not going to work for me.
But being out in the garden made me realise that I have recovered, and sufficiently to begin blogging again: I have been enthusiastically taking up the work on the book I am writing and that I laid aside in January: I am in the midst of making plans for future projects that Trischel is engaged in for later in the year and of course, I have reconnected with my garden.
It is only now that I realise that, like my plants, I have been slowly regrowing from my roots. I had been giving myself the conditions to grow and flourish by using the ‘Three R’s‘ for positive change – remember them? The Reflection of what change I was seeking; the Repetition of positive affirmations and the Reinforcements, which in my case were music and poetry.
Unbeknown to me, just like my plants, my positive practices were feeding the tender shoots of attitudinal changes in me.
Creating personal change is not always dramatically visible; sometimes we try and try and yet there seems no improvement. The temptation is to give it up and throw away the chance to change. Yet if we understand that creating the mental soil for the seeds of our change can take time, maybe we would not give up so soon.
So, if you have been battling with the feeling that despite all your best efforts nothing is changing for you, why not take the time to stroll around your garden, or take a walk in the park. Go with eyes open and look for the changes that the season has brought. Then look at your life again with eyes open and maybe you can begin to see that imperceptibly, change is indeed creeping into your life.
We sometimes move through life as if in a bubble, and while we are so cocooned, outside the seasons change and even if we do not know it, we change with them. We need to break that bubble to see the change.
So if autumn is truly here, can winter be far behind? Let’s watch and see the changes.
Michele @ Trischel