Black Thumb: Getting Used to Making Mistakes
It’s spring around here, which for us out in Seattle, means torrential rains, melting snowpack, floods, and mudslides. What that means for you, dear reader, is a lot of spring planting stories. I’m late to the gardening game; I only started growing things for real in my 30s, when a combination of Forrest’s overzealous nature, a neighbor’s anonymous complaint to the city zoning board, and my own petty nature led to a front yard full of raised beds. My understanding of plants before age 32 was “Put seed in soil. Pour water. Let grow.” So I find a lot of delight in the surprising minutiae of gardening.
The biggest one I was amazed to discover was how many plants die. At first, I lamented each failed seedling, each transplant that didn’t thrive. Until I talked to other gardeners. Like mechanics around an engine, they’d stand looking at the soil, the plant and debate what had gone wrong. And then, always, always, say, “Meh. Just try again. It’s a good excuse to go buy some more seeds.” Last year, I planted carrot seeds four different times and each time the planting failed. I asked gardener after gardener what I was doing wrong. And all of them responded, “Yep. Carrots are like that. Just keep trying.” What is wrong with these people? I’ve never had a hobby where failure is so expected!
By July, people walk by our garden and exclaim how full and lush it looks. By August, we put out 30 zucchinis on a table so people can take them because I don’t want as much as my garden grows. We probably look like some miraculous Eden over here, but I have killed so many beautiful plants. So many.
What does this have to do with community, or forbearance? In community, we are going to fail so many times. We are going to screw up and be hurtful. We are going to get offended over something with no offensive intent. We’re going to be truly grieved by the actions of another person.
And like those seedlings that I keep killing, the result of continued care and attention is not a compost pile full of dead plants but a garden that is lush and full of nutrition. But like that garden, our community needs the healthy soil – all the work we’ve put into self-care, generosity, relaxing expectations, vulnerability and so on. And it needs us to look at the failed seedlings – our hurts, our mistakes – and keep planting. Keep trying. Keep apologizing. Keep giving each other grace to make mistakes.
True growth occurs in fits and starts. I don’t wake up one morning three weeks after planting seeds to see all of my seeds germinated, and then wake up each day to a steady amount of growth until they all produce at the same time. Some days we’re going to struggle in community. Other days it will feel like the sun can’t stop shining. All we have to do is keep feeding ourselves and our connections to others so that when the sunny day comes out, we can harvest our bounty.
