Letting Go and Finding the Joy in IT

Today I heard a show on NPR.  They were interviewing an author about his newest book, and they asked him about getting stuck while writing.  He shared about the process of letting go, of realizing that the last 14 months of work wasn't getting you where you wanted to go.  It was realizing that 140 pages of a book needed to go.  Wow!

When we first arrived here and started a small garden, I was excited to watch as plants began to grow from little seeds, eventually providing a vegetable to eat.  It felt like a mom to so many little beings.  I cared for them, I watered them, I weeded around them so they could be provided with ample space.  Day after day a fussed over them.  At some point that year I realized that they would die, a concept that was unfathomable in my mind.  How could something I poured my soul into, die?  Four years later, as fall approaches I'm wishing them good-bye.  I'm tired of the constant care, the upkeep, and the endless weeding.  So like the writer I'm finally at a place where I'm okay letting my year of work just go.  Instead of helplessness that I felt the first year, I feel liberated and free.  This year I gave up on weeding months ago, ahh! 

For those of you possibly reading this that buys produce from me, don't worry there will still be some until it freezes.  But I won't be sad about it.  Much like my garden I feel like my time is so precious that I can't do anything where I will fail, cause I don't have time for that.  Its created a really intense, stuffy Kerri, that goes and goes.  It's funny how we set goals for ourselves or start something and the newness of it all provides such joy and happiness, like writing this blog.  But then over time it losses that newness and it becomes a chore, a mundane task that has to be done.  So we leave it behind searching for that joy again, in something new. 

I love eating good food, and most of the time I love preparing it, but it becomes a chore and the excitement of it all is lost and I'm left wanting to use a microwave and purchase premade meals.  For what?  For the easiness of it all?  Do I really want to eat prepackaged meals?  Do I really want to stop gardening forever?  Do I really want to discontinue writing this blog?

Obviously the answer is NO!  I want to eat well, I want to watch things grow and to care for them, I even want to carve out a little time to write down my random thoughts and put them out there for whom ever to read.  There is an amount of letting go, when the season is right, and there is an amount of re-finding the joy in the mundane tasks of life and spicing it up again.  But for tonight I choose leftovers.