I guess the universe had something it needed to tell me about this patience stuff.
Pictured: Cuties coffee mug full of Dandelion Root Tea with quote on the little tea flag (technical term) from Lao Tzu, which is transcribed below.
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
Lao Tzu
I sipped this tea while working on the novel I have been struggling with for coming up on two years. I want it to be in a place where I’m tinkering with it but not making wholesale changes to plot, past, and person. I want it just to be beautiful and ready and fucking finished, but it’s not.
In my room, I have four plants, and on my balcony I have a ficus I rescued from the garbage (her name is TrashPlant) and a Monkey Cups (a carnivorous plant) to help with the summer bugs. I am a fairly new plant parent, so these plants have all had some setbacks. Leaves fell. Whole sections died. There was a lot of trimming (read: hacking). They are not as lush and vibrant as I hoped they would be, but they are mine, so kept learning and doing my best to care for them, expecting that this was going to be how it was.
Starting last month, they started growing. All of them. The Monkey Cups are about to open up several new cups. TrashPlant killed off a ton of leaves to turn around and throw up two whole new trunks with leaves bigger than my hand! The plants in my bedroom are tossing out new leaves left and right.
My best friend once told me, when she was helping figure out how to help my plants, “We forget there is so much going on beneath the soil and focus only on what’s going on above ground.” And that’s what I’ve been doing with this book. With so much of my life, really. Focusing on the leaves and the flowers (and the lack thereof), when the work, the growth, is happening in the roots. Losing patience because I can’t (or won’t) see what’s happening before things bloom. Now is a good time to trust the roots.