You cannot hurry it.
That is the first and most complete lesson and I have known it intellectually since the first spring I put seeds in the ground and stood over them every morning willing them to be further along than they were, and the knowing has not prevented the willing, which continues, which is apparently an instinct that intellectual knowledge cannot fully override, the instinct of a woman who has spent her whole life managing toward outcomes and finds it difficult to be in a process that does not respond to management.
The garden does not respond to management.
It responds to conditions. You can improve the conditions, which is different from controlling the outcome. You can amend the soil and water at the right time and plant in the right season and protect from the frost and still lose the tomatoes, which I have done, which the garden offered without apology as a lesson in the difference between doing your part and guaranteeing a result. Doing your part does not guarantee a result. This is not a comfortable lesson for a woman who has spent decades believing that the result was proportional to the effort, that the right outcome would follow the right input the way the conclusion follows the argument.
The garden does not follow arguments.
The garden follows time and temperature and the particular quality of the light in a given year, which varies, which is outside my control, which is not something I can amend or work harder at or compensate for with additional preparation. I can only be in the conditions and do my part and wait and see what comes, which sounds passive and is not passive, which requires its own kind of sustained attention, the attention of a person who is present to what is actually happening rather than managing toward what should be happening.
I am learning this with my mother too.
The conditions are what they are. I can improve them where I can improve them, I can be present, I can do my part, and I cannot determine what comes, cannot manage the trajectory, cannot work harder and thereby change what time and its conditions are doing. I can only be there. I can only tend. I can only show up with the attention that is my part and trust that my part is enough, which the garden has been teaching me, slowly, imperfectly, one season at a time.
The tomatoes are better this year. I am still learning. The learning does not end.
