They way we feel is the product of what we think. Just as with physical gardening, we plant seeds in our minds constantly. Sometimes we choose them, other times we don’t. However, whether a seed flourishes depends entirely on how we care for it. In other words the way we think about something that happens will affect how much it grows and impacts us much more than the fact that it happened. A productive yield of happiness requires both planting and nourishing gratitude and abundance as well as weeding and pruning dissatisfaction and lack. As we do we’ll find we can grow happiness anywhere.
The Law of the Harvest
My Dad loved to garden, and he put all of his daughters to work planting, weeding and watering each summer. Frankly, I thought it was hot and boring a lot of the time; I tried to avoid it whenever I could. One of the pay-offs of our hard work was the tender, rich acidic flavor of red home-grown tomatoes that we picked on summer nights and ate for dinner.
A garden’s yield is directly correlated to the effort put into it. I remember one summer when we were fairy lazy about watering. Then, we went on a family vacation and returned to find the garden sparse and mostly dried up. I remember my sister running into the house sobbing because it meant there would be no home-grown tomatoes that year.
The law of the harvest states that we will reap what we sow. If we want the home-grown tomatoes, we have to plant them, water them, and weed them.
The Law of the Harvest in our Minds
Because I grew up spending Saturday mornings with my fingernails buried in the dirt weeding and watering our backyard garden plot, I find particular poignancy in this quote by Sarah Ban Breathnach about the gardens in our minds.
“Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend… when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present— love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure— the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth.”
This quote hung on my refrigerator for a couple of years to remind me that the law of the harvest applies to my mind. The thoughts I think are like seeds that germinate and grow into plants of feelings and actions and eventually yield the fruit of my overall happiness and relationships and contribution in the world. I determine my yield by the thoughts I choose, and the paradigms I tend and cultivate.
I love the concept that at any time, there are two mental gardens existing at the same time. In any situation, relationship or even with our own self-image, there is always abundance and there are always things lacking. It’s easy to feel that our external situation is the cause of our lack. However, ANY situation has abundance and lack simultaneously. The abundance we feel is directly correlated to how diligent we are in tending the abundant thoughts and allowing the gardens of lack to shrivel up and die.
Mental Gardening Around the World
My husband is a diplomat, which means our family gets to move frequently to various places around the world. When we embarked on this lifestyle I was optimistic about the many ways we could serve and the blessings it would have for our family. I love to travel, explore new places, try new foods, and experience how different cultures do things. I hoped to broaden my children’s minds.
Tending My Garden of Lack
The reality of life abroad however, brought many challenges. I discovered that even the smallest daily tasks were harder than I had experienced in the United States. The water wasn’t safe, so we had to use purified water to brush our teeth and get a drink. We had to bleach all of our veggies and fruits to kill bugs and bacteria. Finding simple items was an epic challenge; there was no Target or Office Depot like I was used to. One day I remember spending over 7 hours driving around the city looking for paper clips and came home empty handed. The difference in time zones made it difficult to call home, and our internet was slow and cut out frequently. I can remember sometimes having to call 6 or 7 times just to make it through a short conversation with a sister.
Driving was challenging. Many of the streets were not marked, and not knowing the language made it difficult to ask for directions. There were times I spent hours lost and driving around with a crying baby in the car. Traffic was oppressive–one time it took me over 3 hours of white knuckled driving to get my children to school. They struggled with bilingual schools; they felt overwhelmed in an environment where they understood nothing. There were no libraries, and the pollution was so bad it often prohibited going to the few rusty parks nearby. Medical care was not always optimal, and sometimes it was in a foreign language.
On difficult days, I would compare my experience there with the idealized life in America I imagined…the mini-van, the cul-de-sac, walking to elementary school, clean water, and the list goes on. When I compared my life abroad to this, things seemed difficult and unfair. Without even realizing it, I began to tend my mental garden of scarcity. The more I noticed how much harder life was, the more I collected evidence of the challenges in my life and my resentment about our lifestyle grew. My garden of scarcity grew and began to take over some of the real estate in my garden of abundance.
My husband and I accepted a posting in Hawaii–I did finally get a little home with a yard on a cul-de-sac. We could brush our teeth in clean water, shop at Target and my kids could speak English in school. I could communicate easier with my extended family. I had all the things I had dreamed about in an American life. My ideal of life on a cul-de-sac—while wonderful had just as many challenges as my life abroad. They were just different. We lived in a small home, abundant with bugs! We had no A/C and it was oppressively hot. The schools were not as stimulating as our previous experience and everything was SO expensive. My children still struggled, but with different things. I still felt discouraged and frustrated. And, I found I missed many of the wonderful things about our ex-pat life.
Tending Abundance
I realized it didn’t matter where I was–there would always be lack as well as abundance. I was focusing on where I was, trying to get to the right place–thinking that the abundant garden was an actual physical place or situation–I realized it wasn’t. The abundant garden is in our minds. We get the abundant garden by the positive thoughts we plant and nourish by intentionally focusing on. Lack will always be present as well. But we dry out that garden as we give it less attention.
With this shift in my understanding of abundance, I began to see my life in a new way. The challenges didn’t evaporate, they stayed the same, but I began to notice the abundance in my life and focus on that. I could walk to the beach! My children could go slip-and-sliding in the backyard and we could be outside year round! There were breathtaking hikes just minutes away. We made some wonderful friends and we had lots of family come and visit. Hawaii became my garden of Eden…not because of where or what it was, but how I thought about it.
Similarly as we’ve moved abroad again, I have found a life full of abundance in our ex-pat life as well. The difficult things of living outside of the US are still part of our life. There is still traffic, food and sanitation issues, and language barriers. None of that has changed. At times I get frustrated by them, but I’m learning to prune those thoughts and not allow them to overtake my garden of all the abundant things I do love about our life. When those thought arise, I just allow them to pass through, but don’t let them take root. I try to think of the inconveniences as part of the package deal that comes with so many benefits for our family.
I spend a lot more time noticing the amazing education my children are getting, nurturing relationships with other ex-pat women who have lived all over the world, and relishing our family outings on Saturdays to ruins, natural wonders and historical treasures. I try to stop and notice things; the other day I saw a man riding a bicycle stacked high with cardboard boxes several times taller than himself riding through a developed intersection full of cars. I thought about how fascinating this life is–and how amazing it is to have a car to drive.
This mental gardening has helped my emotional garden of abundance to grow and has helped to prune back my garden of lack. It has indeed caused “the wasteland of illusion to fall away, and allow me to experience Heaven on Earth.” (Or at least moments of it. 😉
Tend Your Garden of Abundance
What area of your life do you want to improve?
When you think about that area, what is in your emotional garden of lack? What about your garden of abundance? Tend the garden you want to grow. Nourish the thoughts of abundance by thinking of them often, talking about them, writing them down. Acknowledging the lack is fine, but dwelling on it will diminish the sense of abundance.
