Winter-cleaning

I winter-cleaned yesterday.

Sorting meticulously through the garden on a crisp-bright day, filling two large bags of past-prime tomato plants, half-rotted stems weighted down by new growth above. The roses were trimmed, the falling-inward daisy bush cut to nudity.

The garden is winter-bare now. Disused vegetable patches awaiting summer sun have been sprinkled with lentils and soy beans to grow a green manure cover crop and add nutrients for summer's new tomato crop. Parts of lawn that yet retain their dew on the hottest winter days are resting from brutal trims.

All the old vegetation is on the "compost" heap (a nice term for the pile of anything I weed out, throw out or clear out, which currently houses a family of stripey field mice).

I guess it's de-cluttering in a way. Clearing out the old so that the ground can rest and renew.

To me that's what winter's all about, what God intended this down-time to be. A resting before the busyness of Spring and Summer, a time set apart when everything slows to minimum activity, sleeps in and puts on a bit of fat (at least in my case).

But you can't do it with last season's old stuff lying around. You need to create a clear space in your environment, in your head, where resting is an eye-option, a mind-option, a heart-option - without distraction.