Masonry Queen becomes Patient Gardener
July 3, 2008I am the definition of contradiction, I am the Queen Mason and Patient Gardener, I am both and all at the same time.
From the age of naught, since the time I was but a spec on the imagination of my mother and possibly my fathers mind’s, I have been the Gardener in the people I meet’s lives. A wilting flower? No sweat I will water that sagging flower within you until it blooms once more in all its wonderful colour and array. That is who I am, that is how I have always been, that is how I will always be.
All the while I water your spiritual garden I neglect mine, instead of doing the required regular weed pulling, planting and watering I build walls. Walls around my spirit, my soul, who I really am, I hide. I am the expert in where these walls go, how they are built, how high they should go and what bricks to use. I am the Queen of Masonry.
I understand that in order for me to water your garden I have to do at least a bit of tending to my own, but not to the levels I should have. After all How much water can be thrown over a high wall? How easy is it planting a gorgeous orchid when you are balancing on the top of a wall the height of a skyscraper? Not easy, no. Perhaps my strength in tending to other peoples spiritual gardens is so strong for the fact that I have never really concentrated on my own. My gardening skills are unbalanced if you will.
When you are in a relationship, be it with a partner or with a friend, there are always three gardens to attend to much like the picture below - yours, mine and ours.
Firstly, on the left is your garden that you yourself need to tend to, look after, water, plant and weed.
Then on the right is your partners or friends garden, they to have to water, plant and weed making sure that it survives and grows.
Then finally we get the garden in the middle, our garden, this to needs to be watered, weeded and new plants planted every now and then.
If one of these three gardens is not being attended to then it becomes unbalanced, in discord and will start to resemble something much like a dead ant sucked dry by a leech, it can happen so fast, with a blink an eye, poof all dried out.
Look after your own garden too much and the other two get neglected, enough neglect and they slowly wither and die. The same is true when it comes to looking after the other two gardens more than your own, just this time yours is the one that withers.
All three gardens can be healthy and thriving, the balance perfect in the sense that all gardens are being weeded, watered and encouraged to grow but this takes hard work and practice. Just like anything else, like any garden, you can’t just put a garden together and expect it to grow. No, unfortunately you need to know which kind of plants work best under the different weather conditions, which plants need shade and which prefer full sunlight, how much to water them and what to plant next to them. Then on top of that “knowledge” you also need to think about the colours, sizes and fragrances of the plants you’re putting in your garden, do they compliment each other? Do they work well on the “whole”? and finally do they compliment the middle garden and in turn the third garden?
Now if you are a good mason such as I am, your garden will be filled with walls ranging from little hurdles through to impressive skyscrapers. How do you know where to plant the plants in your garden when you need to travel through an intricate maze first? Never mind knowing where to plant, how do you know what to plant because the sunlight falls differently depending on the day, month and season. The best yet is, how do you know what has already been planted if you can’t see over the walls in the first place?
With all that in mind how can we ever expect to know if someone else’s garden compliments ours if we don’t know what we have to begin with.
We are all masons in our own right, some of us are better with more experience, we all build walls. It is what we do with those walls that matters. Do we leave them up as permanent fixtures or do we instead break them down and use the remaining bricks in a water feature or paving the path in between the flower beds…. What we do is up to us.
I never knew what was in my garden, I was always busy watering others more than my own, the walls sky high, the sunlight very rarely filtered in. Ultimately, no matter what I did, I would never find the perfect partner or the friend that complimented my personality, my nature or my plants.
I still have many many walls to break down, 29 years worth of walls, all of them different sizes, densities and heights. I am retiring as the pro-mason now, I am handing in my wall making tools.
I am now a full time gardener, how about you?
tea supervised tea party though it was tickets for young DM, he was soon found lying under the summer sun, grass out of his mouth singing renditions of a certain love song… He can be seen singing on the left of sister Joy on the right (yes that is lipstick you see there) Below is a cover version recently done by some or other female chimp.
… dreams do come true, when the time is right anything is possible! You can do it girlfriend!
