Going to Pot

There was a "Peanuts" cartoon lately that I identified with. Charlie Brown is lying in bed, not sleeping. He says, "Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I think, 'Maybe I can change my life around.'" In the second panel, he thinks, "Then a voice comes to me out of the dark, 'Sure, make a lot of paperwork for the rest of us.'"

Lately, I have been creating a lot of paperwork for many people! This truly is a common consequence of change.

I have been transplanting. Last Sunday I took to gardening, always a nervous time for my plants. I took almost all of them out of the pots they'd been in, and put them in others. I pulled them up by their pot-bound, intertwined roots and shook 'em until they gave up as much of their "old" dirt as they would let go of, and then I put 'em in "new" dirt, in new "digs," by themselves, or with new "bedfellows." I fertilized/fed and watered.

And now I wait. I wait to see how the "transplant" has taken. Will they like it? Will they flower? Or will they shrivel, shrink from the shock-- or simply because they liked it the way it was? (I mean, plants like people can grow comfortable when roots are intertwined in familiar ways. Freedom-- room to grow and be ourselves-- can be a formidable thing.)

I have been transplanted. For thirty years or more I had been living in the same series of pots, in the same soil, trying to live in some way true to myself and also "bloom where I was planted," as the saying goes. Well, what I found out was that some soil is not altogether fit for some plants, and vice versa. Hopefully, I have been transplanted into soil better fit for me to thrive in-- as myself, for the gifts I have been given and the gifts I have to give, to bear the fruit I actually have within me to bear. I cannot know for sure.

I can only trust The Gardener. I know that I wouldn't have been transplanted were it not for my own good, because The Gardener does not really care about how much paperwork such change eventuates! And I know that The Gardener is watching, watering, and waiting.

This column, this new blog, is my effort to see if I can bear new fruit, find another voice (or voices), to see for myself if this transplantation isn't truer to myself.

Let's see how this goes, ok, Dear Reader!