One thing that every garden needs is weeding. You planted some productive plants neatly in tidy rows and before you know where they come from, there are lots and lots of unwanted weeds rearing their pretty little heads and choking out the plants you are carefully nurturing. Sometimes it doesn’t take very long-it seems you turn your back for a moment, look around and they are –full sprung. We need watchfulness and determination to keep ahead of them and we need to recognize them as weeds. Sometime we realize too late that we have actually been watering  the weeds while we were admiring how nicely our garden is looking.

Weeding in one’s home has become a popular topic these days –decluttering, downsizing, simplifying- there is a blog or a book about it. Our stuff becomes like the weeds, multiplying until it threatens to engulf us.  It can be almost anything that  slyly takes more and more of our time and attention until we are unable to move because we are surrounded by it. We need to recognize the weeds in our life- what is consuming our life-  television, accumulation of material goods, collections, innocent things that  slowly and unceasingly grow until they choke the life out of us. We need to weed out the important so we can see what is important.

Our thoughts need a tremendous amount of weeding. Negativity, judgment, frustrations, envy,  greed, fear and competition are some of the weed thoughts that grow in us all under the cover of rational and logical thought. They say people think 30000 thoughts in one day. What percent of these are weed thoughts and what percent choke out and overcome the productive thoughts? How much time do we spend weeding our thought garden? And how much time do we spend planting  or replanting healthy productive ones?

Weeding is no doubt a chore, but ignoring the job or not seeing the weeds or looking the other way or pretending that our garden has no weeds has consequences. Every garden needs to be weeded, carefully, consistently and often. Weeding results in a produce filled garden, a beautiful life and a loving spirit.