Laying Down Arms: Surrender in the Garden

Summer - Week 25 - On The Teachers That Come Uninvited

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

There is a moment each morning when I step outside and survey what the night has delivered. Not the newspaper or the mail, but nature's own correspondence written in nibbled leaves and scattered earth. Yesterday's carefully planted seedlings bear the delicate tooth marks of rabbits. The grass grows taller and stubbornly between the stones I've laid. Some mornings, it's the raucous cry of blue jays that cuts through the quiet dawn I thought I had curated for myself. And somewhere in the garden, grasshoppers are already feasting with the quiet persistence of tiny philosophers who understand something about abundance that I am only beginning to grasp.

My first instinct is always the same: frustration. The human impulse to control, to curate, to create order from what appears to be chaos. But somewhere between irritation and action, I remember being seven years old, crouched in my grandma's backyard, watching ants carry crumbs three times their size across the flagstone path. Back then, every "pest" was a miracle. The dandelions weren't weeds but wishes waiting to be blown into the wind. The slugs weren't garden villains but fascinating creatures leaving silver trails like calligraphy across the morning sidewalk.

When did we learn to see invasion where children see invitation? When did wonder curdle into conflict?

Perhaps the shift happens when we begin to believe in ownership rather than relationship, when we start thinking in terms of property lines rather than shared spaces. But Indigenous wisdom keepers have always known what children intuitively understand - that the earth belongs to itself, and we are simply part of its vast, interconnected community.

The plants I call weeds tell their own story of this misunderstanding. Take the stubborn quackgrass weaving itself through all my garden beds, traditional peoples would recognize it as a relative, a being with its own gifts and purposes. The dandelions scattered across my lawn were once treasured medicines, their bitter leaves cleansing winter-weary bodies each spring, their roots reaching deep to bring minerals to the surface.

These plants aren't accidents or mistakes. They are the earth's own doctors, arriving precisely where they're needed most. The persistent roots send out underground messengers to colonize disturbed soil. The nitrogen-fixing clover enriches depleted ground. The broad leaves of lamb's quarters provide food for both insects and humans. What we've labeled as invasion is often restoration - the land healing itself with patient, persistent care.

The rabbits who sample my tender plants are following pathways older than any human garden, moving through the landscape with an ancient knowledge of seasons and sustenance. In traditional stories, the rabbit is often the trickster, the one who reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously, who teaches through gentle disruption. Perhaps these midnight visitors are offering the same teaching, that our careful plans are just one small part of a much larger, more complex design.

Even the grasshoppers, those minute orchestrators of gentle destruction, offer their own teaching. They arrive not as plague but as proof of the garden's vitality, drawn to the life force that pulses through every green shoot and unfurling leaf. In many Indigenous traditions, insects are honored as the ones who keep the world in balance, who ensure that no single species dominates completely. Their presence signals success. I have created something worth eating, something that nourishes the great community of earth.

This shift in perspective from defender to participant, from adult anxiety to childlike wonder, requires a fundamental act of surrender. It asks us to lay down our weapons of resistance, to stop fighting the very forces that sustain us. There is something deeply liberating in this release, in the moment we stop swimming against the current and allow ourselves to be carried by the river of life that flows through every garden, every yard, every wild space.

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Now when I kneel to pull weeds and find their roots intertwined so deeply with the soil that they seem less like intruders and more like the earth's own hair. Now when the thistles guard themselves with thorns, making my fingers bleed as I try to uproot them, they too become the earth's own teachers. Their prickly resistance a reminder that some things are meant to stay put. And, in that moment of yeilding with my fingers stinging - I recognize that we are not separate from nature, but expressions of it, that every creature in the garden is both teacher and relative.

What if when we plant now, we plant with the knowledge that we are setting a table not just for ourselves but for the multitude of creatures who share this space? What if when we water, we are nourishing a community that includes the soil microbes, the earthworms, the beneficial insects, and yes, even the rabbits?

This surrender doesn't mean abandoning care or intention, but rather expanding our understanding of what caring looks like. Moving from control to collaboration, from resistance to receptivity. Even the aspen seedlings that sprout boldly in my lawn become teachers of patience, tiny trees dreaming of joining their mountain cousins, carrying the ancient memory of Colorado's high country in their tender leaves. The creeping bindweed that wraps itself around everything I've planted becomes a tutor in this new paradigm. Nature's own reminder that connection, not separation, is the fundamental way of the world.

There is profound comfort in recognizing our embeddedness in these larger patterns. In a world that often feels fragmented and disconnected, these small encounters with wild life remind us that we are part of something vast and ongoing. The frustration dissolves into something deeper: gratitude for the privilege of participation, wonder at the complexity of the systems that sustain us, and humility before the wisdom encoded in every creature that shares our patch of earth.

Children know this instinctively. They see the garden as a place of endless discovery, where every day brings new mysteries and marvels. They don't mourn the holes in the lettuce leaves, they marvel at the precise way caterpillars can navigate from one bite to the next. They don't curse the moles that tunnel under the lawn, they wonder at the secret cities being built beneath their feet.

Perhaps the most beautiful gardens are not those that exclude the wild but those that find ways to dance with it. Where we discover that the earth is not a possession to be controlled but a community to be honored, not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be celebrated.

The peace that comes with this letting go is profound: the end of endless battle, and the embrace of our place in the world that holds us all.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let's experience nature's gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane