“You haven’t stopped,” he said. “You’ve simply changed gear. I know it feels like nothing is happening, but it’s just a winter garden. You look at it, and everything is a mess and nothing is growing, and it feels like nothing is happening. But you know that deep in the warmth underground worms are turning over the soil, roots are stretching themselves, stored energy is being released. There’s a lot happening below the surface, you just can’t see it yet.”
I think that’s true. Not least because he wasn’t the only person to express the same notion in different words over the course of a few days.
Someone else keeps reminding me: it’s happening without being very explicit about what “it” is.
And I agree with them, working on the premise that we have overlapping aspirations for the coming months, years, lifetimes…or somewhere in between. We’ve talked a lot about what needs to be done, what we each want to do, where we’re trying to get to and why. We’ve also skirted around what’s not being done, without providing reasons or excuses, simply acknowledging that “no, not yet, not quite, not really’’.
Even so, when we say it’s happening, I think I can feel it.
I can feel it, the way I can feel the warmth beneath the surface of the soil when I delve my hand into the earth. I can feel it, the way I can feel the energy shift when certain people enter or leave my immediate reality. I don’t have to trust that the shifts I have wanted to make in my life are beginning to be manifest. I know that they are. I can feel the growth, even if I can’t actually point to it and say: look, see, there.
Fortunately, I don’t need to point and speak. I don’t need to prove my growth points to anyone. I don’t have KPIs to report on. There are no Brownie points or bonus payments to be earned. The only reward for my growth and development is my growth and development. The only gain is the one you get when you pause on a climb and look back at the view behind and think: wow!
And the only challenge I now have is the one you get when you turn back to your north, your forward direction and look at the climb ahead and think…Oh, (deep breath), Ok then…onwards and upwards but smiling now because you’re reinforced with all those memories of the things you didn’t think you could do or be or survive and you know that you could and were and did, which means you can do it again, more easily.
Simple, yes?
Yes. But as I’ve said many times before: simple is not the same as easy.
The thing about the Winter Garden is precisely that we cannot see what is happening. We have to either work on trust and faith that it is, or we have to find ways of proving to ourselves that it is, or we simply struggle through until Spring. Which of those applies depends on the precise nature of our personal Winter.
Someone surprised me recently into admitting that I am deeply insecure. Not unreasonably they asked what it would take to make me feel secure. I still don’t know the answer, but I started to think about when I did feel secure – and why I no longer do.
This isn’t a complete tangent. I think insecurity may be my current Winter.
I was secure in Clive because he gave me the freedom to be me, including the bits of me he didn’t much like. Over time, he made it very clear that he’d take me as I was. Over time, he made it clear that he wasn’t going to make me happy, but that he’d do everything he could to enable me to make me happy and he’d be there when I wasn’t. Being able to trust in that only comes with time and the reinforcement from experience.
I was secure in my work because I was good at it – and because my boss for 10 years, now a client, had seen both the best and the worst of me. He saw me rise to challenges. He saw me learn and grow, and made sure I was aware of how much I was doing that. He also kicked my butt when I deserved it. I trusted him (still trust him) because he was never “nice” to me. He was honest. I believe his compliments because I’ve been on the end of his criticism.
I was psychologically secure because I’d been on the same track for decades and it seemed to be working.
So now...I feel that by and large I’m on my own. It certainly isn’t true, but it is often how I feel. And no matter how many times I tell myself You’ve got this. I don’t believe me. I’m not sure that I have.
Feeling secure needs me to know that whatever happens next, I will be able to handle it. I need to re-root or re-anchor. Centre. Claim my power. Stand in my light.
Of course I need to feel loved – we all do. And with Clive gone that needs to come from different relationships, different kinds of relationship, but it also needs to come from within, from a belief that I am lovable. Being loved and feeling loved are two different things. The difference between them doesn’t rest outside of us. What we feel is perception, and perception comes entirely from within.
I can list the people I know love me...but a lot of the time, I don’t feel it...and I need to work out why that is, and how to open myself up to feeling it. Part of being in the Winter Garden is that we have also retreated underground, become hermits, hidden away to hibernate. We cannot access the higher parts of our self so easily. We need to rest and refuel.
We need to recognise that we are also trees who have shed their leaves and need to simply stand and hold our ground, while the worms and the moles and the microbes and mycelium do their stuff hidden from view: keeping our soil aerated and nutrient rich, warning us of incoming challenges and preparing us to meet them.
We need to recognise that our feelings of insecurity are valid. We feel insecure because we are. The Winter Garden will be beset by frost and flood and fog-damp. It will be battered by storm winds. It will be smothered by snow. It will lurk under heavy clouded ceilings that deny there is anything bluer and brighter above them. The Winter Garden might trust that there will be another Spring: but in its more honest moments, it admits that it is not entirely convinced.
In my Winter Garden I see that I miss the feeling of “working” and of knowing that I am good at what I’m doing.
I am doing very different work now. I don’t have the kind of validation I am used to. I don’t have the basis upon which to determine when people mean what they say, and when they are just trying to be supportive. There are no absolute measures anymore. Plus, I’m a beginner again, so if even if there were absolute measures I wouldn’t be scoring very highly.
In that sense my Winter Garden isn’t just sleeping. It is all newly planted and waiting, not just for Spring to return, but for its very first Spring. There is no telling what will come up and what will not. No amount of effort on my part can speed the Spring. No amount of creative thinking or problem solving can influence the outcome. Yes the spadework and weeding and water-management need to be kept in train…but there is much waiting and watching to be done. And that is the harder part of the craft.
What it would take to make me feel secure is the wrong question. The right question is ‘how can I get used to being insecure?’
I have no answer to that, but I suspect that it will come down to practice. Experience. Endurance. If my Winter garden is not certain of Spring because this particular garden has not yet seen one, then I need only wait, for Spring will surely come…and each time we see a new Spring, so each time the next Winter holds less fear for us.
Each time we see our new growth, so we learn to trust what happens beneath the earth of our visible activity.
Each time we ‘get it’ – whatever ‘it’ might be – so we learn to understand how much of the work was done ‘between’…between the work-outs, between the discussions, between the one day and the next…between the planting and the budding and the blooming.
So remember…if it feels like nothing is happening and everything is a mess and nothing is growing, it is just a Winter garden…and deep in the warmth underground worms are turning over the soil, roots are stretching themselves, stored energy is being released. There’s a lot happening below the surface, you just can’t see it yet
