Tend and Create

Recently I was asked to describe how I feel, what I experience, when I engage in two of my favorite pastimes. These two activities, while both fulfilling, are complimentary. I can lose all sense of time doing either, yet one - gardening - is more calming or reflective, while the other - sewing - involves focus and creative thinking, problem solving. It was interesting to spell out, but at the same time, not too surprising. It makes sense that the activities you enjoy would be complimentary, meet different needs.

Several days later, I was thinking about that conversation and realized that when it comes down to it, those two activities for me are about tending and creating. Tending the plants that we are (trying) to grow. Preparing a place for them, tending to their needs for nourishment first as seeds, then as small but growing plants, (occasionally) pulling the weeds growing up all around so they might have an easier time of it, picking the ripe vegetables to encourage the plants to keep growing (not to mention enjoying their goodness...), and finally cutting down the spent plants to provide nourishment for future gardens. And in my sewing, creating. Taking fabric and thread, a pattern or the idea of a pattern and using my skills and hands to make something useful and/or pleasing to look at. To figure, cut, figure again, join, solve problems as they come and (usually) end up with results I can see, hold in my two hands and have the satisfaction of having created from a pile of assorted materials.

To tend and create.

I think that is a mighty fine way to live and to view the activities that occupy my days. Because when I think about it, that's the basis for most of what I do. I tend: to growing things - plants, boys, chickens, to our home (Isn't that a nicer way to look at tackling the piles of laundry and dishes, cobwebs and coatings of dust on anything that doesn't move? I must remember that more often...), to finances, to relationships. I create: meals, sewing projects, a comfortable, relatively peaceful space to live (some creations are more successful than others, at times).

What I like about this realization, what resonates with me is that these are simple, intentional ways of being, to tend and to create, and yet there is so much space within them to harbor all the complexities that keep life interesting. For me, the complexity comes naturally, it's the simplicity I hope to learn to focus on and see more as I go about my days.