Transformation and orchards

Lordy
Some times things get thrown at you that just make your head spin

Sometimes i don't feel big enough to take em on you know?

I was wondering out loud this morning about why transformation seems to always come with such painful parts... why the pain is part of the process.

I felt trapped by the weight of worry and overwhelm.

I had been sitting all the previous day making  a video of my creative journal for the course i am teaching soon (yes i know - how grown up is that??? - I will be posting details as soon as the site is finalised - let me just say it is going to be super luscious)

So weighed down by the worries and feeling overwhelmed by the weeds in the orchard i decided to move my body and get out there and move some weed.

I took some dead sticks off the lizard home pile (to the neighbours it looks like an unsightly bonfire which never happens) and took them and some wormy decayed material down to the orchard, layered it and then started pulling out weeds...

kikuyu the way it reaches out and takes hold where it can, running under, running over, reaching out, surviving
Buttercup, small at first but when your back is turned pouncing outwards with it's smiley yellow petals
Plantain steadfast and brave looking - offering it's seed heads for a good game of gullotine in exchange for a chance to let it's leaves reach thickly up 
milk thistle guinea pigs favourite, bleeding snowblood where i pulled its head and arms off...

each plant so determined to do what is in its deepest nature

but i have a plan - i want my orchard to work a certain way, have certain plants there to pollinate that one there, companion plants looking messy to the eye but there is a buzzing sense of aliveness around them that i just can't quite gather into my logical brain, but know is true nonetheless

And although the milkweed bleeds and the plantain gets hacked out by the mattock it goes on the compost heap, to break down, to transform into nourishment for that which i do want to grow

and i guess i spent 3/4hr sweating and grunting and barrowing and pulling to prove to myself why it is so painful

because stuff has to die in order for other stuff to flourish

and that dying is no less painful when there is a master (or mistress) plan

I hope the fruit i am making in my life is worth the milkweedy parts of me that are dying off right now...