Because it is Never Quite Completed

I had begun to think of weeding as something akin to breathing...or blinking -- reflexive movements that one simply does without thinking too much about it.  Second thought, however, corrects that overly generous comparison.  Unlike those bodily examples, you don't have to do it.  You can get by without devoting the time and the energy.  It is, finally, your privilege to make the choice.  There are consequences, to be sure, but not immediate ones.  Weeding is more "maintenance," in some sense of the word, and preventative if given the longer view -- which is to say that weeding is much more like exercise...or flossing.  You know the dentist's dictum about flossing:  "you don't have to floss all your teeth; just the ones you want to keep."  The value of exercise, while perhaps not so cleverly stated, is something of the same.  Exercise -- at least regular physical activity -- is only necessary to the degree that health is desired. 

And so I weed so that the garden can be healthy -- so that the desirable growth can have its way with as little opposition as possible.  It does nothing to prevent deleterious invasion, although some fungi and molds may, in the process, be held at bay.  Insects are certainly not deterred by my attentions.  But surely the slow and inexorable siphons and suffocations -- those almost passive environmental decays of crowding and choking and shading and resource diversion -- are defeated by my ministrations. 

At least temporarily.

Perhaps that recognition is the gift of it all.  Just as I cannot take one deep breath and be done with that task for the rest of the day or the rest of the week; just as I cannot perform a few calisthenics and be perpetually healthy, I cannot finally get the garden weeded.  As soon as I complete the project it demands resumption from the beginning.  There is a dailiness to the work that echoes the rest of the best of life -- the routinized discipline of attentive care.  It is akin to telling my wife that I love her: saying it "once upon a time" doesn't quite suffice.  Saying it today -- or not -- is consequential both for her and for me. 

How much of life, I've begun to ask myself, is like weeding -- not so much in its purging but in its constant invitation to pay attention and step into the fray? 

Tomorrow I will resume the fingered attentions.  Tonight I will breath, blink, floss...

...and speak a word of love.