“For you, the seed for your next art work lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece.  Such imperfections (or mistakes if you are feeling particularly depressed about them today) are your guides – valuable, reliable, objective, non-judgemental guides – to the matters you need to reconsider or develop futher.”   David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear

Probably most people could have cleaned all the detritus out of my 10 x 10 plot in less than two hours.  You might even be thinking you could have done it.  And I say, yes.  You could.

But it’s taking me longer.  I’ve spent a couple of afternoons so far.  For one thing, I want to leave behind as many roots as I can.  They’ve done so much work for months and months, tunneling the dirt apart to find their water and minerals.  Their structure is part of the soil now, and I want them to stay.  That means cutting the plants back a bit at a time, till I can break them off at the soil line.

For another thing – for a lot of reasons I am not going to get into – I am using grocery bags to take the organic matter to the municipal collection site. So – you can picture me standing in the pathway, crushing handfuls of huge cosmo and zinnia stems into a pieces that will fit in a Trader Joe’s bag.  Because that’s what I’m doing.

I feel a little guilty for how good it feels to have something so big be finished for a while.  But the sun and the cold wind are a pretty good antidote for guilt.  So is crushing plant stems into small, bag sized pieces.

This is the first time in a very long time that  I’ve dipped back into work from a prior year.  Maybe it makes sense to lean a little bit on energy gathered a while ago, as this year’s garden returns to the essential components of light, water and earth.