Do you ever get so mad at the world that you clean your house fueled only by rage and indignation bubbling up from your soul? Have you ever gardened that way?
I’m starting a new trend. I call it rage gardening.
It’s like rage cleaning, but in the garden. I’m sure a lot of you’ve been there– you’re mad at the world. Or at your work. Or at your husband. Or your kids. Or just life in general. And so you clean your house powered by anger and frustration.
The other day I was fed up. Done. Frustrated doesn’t begin to describe it. I had just come home from a visit with my parents.
My dad is very sick with cancer. I want to fix it. I want to help. I can’t fix his cancer.
I CAN visit. I CAN bring meals or do yard work.
But my parents worry that I’m “driving too much” (~2 hours) to come visit them. They refuse to accept any sort of help.
Which is a hard pill to swallow when all your life you’ve been the fixer of things. I can’t fix this.
I came home that day with my head pounding, my thoughts swirling in my head. My thoughts were everywhere and nowhere all at once.
All I wanted was a little time to myself in the garden.
A break. And it wasn’t happening that day. To add insult to injury, it was also Mother’s Day.
Truth be told I might have also wanted to bury my husband out in the garden that day. But he was busy tearing up the kitchen brewing beer. A double-batch. So I was gardening in 5-minute intervals trying to keep my kids from hurting themselves or each other.
I couldn’t seem to get to any of the bigger projects I had in mind– mostly because my kids wouldn’t stay in one place and just kept dragging out everything they could get their hands on. Which added to my frustration.
So I grabbed my pruners and started pruning random dead bits and branches. I walked around looking for things that had been driving me nuts but I never seemed to have my pruners on me at the time. I pulled some weeds.
As my wheelbarrow started filling up with weeds, branches and dead bits of perennials, I slowly started to feel a little better.
Sometimes the satisfaction of pulling weeds soothes all that ails you.
I went and got my big lopping shears and took out some bigger branches that were annoying me. That really got me feeling better.
I was absolutely taking out all my anger, rage and frustration by gardening. And it felt great.
I think what helped was just the physical nature of what I was doing gave my angry energy an outlet (without hurting anyone). And also the satisfaction of having something actually completed.
I spend a lot of time keeping an eye on small people, perpetually starting and stopping my own projects. So finally taking care of a bunch of things that just made my shoulders slump and my mind think “Oh crap” every time I saw it was an enormous relief.
It also helped all the swirling thoughts about my dad’s cancer calm down for awhile. I can’t fix his situation. But I could cut out that weird branch on our magnolia tree sticking out at a funny angle that bugged me every time I looked at it out my kitchen window.
It felt good to fix something that day.
And in the end my husband cleaned up the beer brewing mess in the kitchen and made dinner. Which probably saved his life and preserved my sanity for another day.
I hope I’m not alone in my rage gardening, or at least that I’ve inspired you to try it sometime. What are your favorite rage gardening activities? Pulling weeds? Slinging mulch? Mowing?
Rage gardening is not necessarily healthy ALL the time. It’s been a long journey for me to figure out what I need to keep my sanity intact. One of the big changes I made was restoring “margin” to my days.
If you liked this post, please subscribe to Grounded and Growing today and receive your copy of “15 Tips to Become a '15 Minute Gardener'” so you can spend less time working ON your garden and more time enjoying being IN your garden.! It’s absolutely free. When you join the Grounded and Growing community, you’ll finally take the garden off your “To-Do” list and allow yourself time to enjoy your garden and savor the peace and serenity there. I tell subscribers about new posts as soon as I hit ‘publish’ and send weekly-ish updates on what’s going on in my garden– good, bad AND ugly.
All Rights Reserved. © 2019 Jennifer Schultz Nelson.
[…] wrote Jennifer Nelson, who has a Ph.D. in horticulture and is the founder of gardening website Grounded and Growing. “I spend a lot of time keeping an eye on small people, perpetually starting and stopping my own […]