Gardening the mind.

 Welcome to my garden...where  therapy meets theology and comedy meets compost. 

Muddy hands and feet....clear mind and heart full of possibilities—that’s the mental space created every day as I redo my garden.

Spring is in the air. The roots are deep. Are there promises yet to creep?

Weeds grow faster than gossip. They pop up everywhere. The more you take them out, the more they reappear from nowhere—or rather, now from somewhere. 

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Every week, pruning and planting plays a role. Everything grows and glows in its own wonderful time.

Weeds are surprisingly comparable to our habits, addictions, compulsions, and yes—exes. It’s a comedy of errors . As the gardener and I scraped up the first layer of grass, the same weeds showed up again in three to four days—as if they owned the place. And they brought cousins. Of course, we had to turn them out—with a treatment and a touch of determination.

Sometimes, the struggle we humans have with our emotions and habits is exactly like that. Some things are easy to let go off—like feeding a loud thought. Others take longer.

 Patience, practice, and strategy are the key. Otherwise, they stick around like unhappy partners—you can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. 

Compulsive, intrusive thoughts are permanent weeds unless you decide to work on them.

And yes, your neighbors will notice you ,especially when your lower back pain hits mid-battle.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” said Keats. Plants have personalities. Some are perfectly fine on their own—low-maintenance introverts. Others demand constant attention, like needy overthinkers.

As I admire my dark pink bougainvillea and sip my morning tea, I talk to it gently. It still wilts dramatically. Like me. Like you. Then I observe the mustard bougainvillea—and I find it behaves just the same. We humans are no different. Different colors, same soul, many bodies.

You dig your soil, you water your love, but don’t expect the reapers to behave. You do your own karma. As the Bhagavad Gita says:

“Perform your duty with detachment and without expectation of results.” (BG 2.47)

Among trees, I am the Ashvattha,the Peepal .(BG 10.26)

I am the taste in the water, the light of the sun and moon, the fragrance in the earth. (BG 7.8)

Even in the weeds, even in the worms, Krishna is watching—and maybe laughing.

The variety of wildflowers I didn’t plant, the morning visitors I don’t even know by name—it’s such a good crime, this chaos of creation. The little squirrels treat my garden as their luxury litter box, and I grudgingly accept it.

How fast some behaviors show their root! Some are Adobe. Some, just fluff. Some become the personality itself.

Rearranging plants feels like rearranging my own thoughts. The act of cleaning physical space always clears mental space. It makes room for beauty.

Gardening is more than a hobby. It’s therapy. It’s philosophy.

As Juliet once said:

“That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Unless, of course, it's a weed pretending to be a rose. In which case—grab your gloves. We’ve got some pruning to do.