Gewgaws and Preoccupied Attentions

"We do not, in our gardens, need rarities, nor more land, nor a better climate.  We merely need more labor and less grumbling, more brains and fewer store-bought gewgaws, and most of all more awareness of what is in front of us in the garden.  What good would a whole orchard full of daffodils be, if our minds were preoccupied with palm trees?"

---The Essential Earthman:  Henry Mitchell on Gardening

“... all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper.  ‘I am watching you – are you watching yourself in me?’” 

---Lawrence Durrell, The Spirit of Place 

I suppose I have always had this problem.  Before, it was books.  More and more books.  Always another book.  Research, I sensed -- always looking for the next better answer or better way of accomplishing something -- was a way of never getting around to actually doing that thing I was reading to improve.  "Magic" was always just around the corner...in the next book.  To be sure, there is a fine line between inquisitive aspiration and artful avoidance -- between an insatiable aspiration for the perfect and a procrastination of the adequate.

Along with the books have been the "gewgaws" that Mitchell decries.  I have, for example,  just taken delivery of the 4th or 5th (I am losing count) floor care tool I have purchased since moving to the farm -- each, in turn, anticipated to be the "perfect" accessory for housekeeping.  With each one -- this newest one to soon be included, I'm sure -- I demonstrate the veracity of his observation:  what's needed is not another gadget, but a little more effort.

There are garden tools that make life easier among the trenches and their vines.  A particularly satisfying weeder we purchased comes to mind.  But I have yet to find a substitute for time spent, labor invested, and attentions focused on what is before my eyes.  It is truly amazing what happens as a result:  I find grass that needs pulling, bugs that need squishing, blossoms that need admiring, and fruit that needs harvesting.  In the process I find me sweating...and also smiling.  Because I have been present; appreciative and intertwined with the wonder that is transpiring there.  I have felt my pulse, offered its life, and in some transcendent way watched not only the landscape before me, but watched myself within it.