A year ago, almost to the day, I wrote about my experiences as a gardener who couldn’t garden due to illness and what that taught me about myself and gardening. I ended the piece by musing on a reassurance from my partner Davin that come spring both the garden and I would be here.

Eventually, spring did come and I was still here. And so was the garden. Better still, I WAS able to garden. And while some things had changed (including me), looking at the garden, it was as if nothing bad had happened. Self-seeding annuals came back. Most perennials survived. There was an abundance of food to eat, especially in terms of self-seeding crops and wild things. There were more pollinators and interesting critters than ever before. Life went on.

That said, it was not as it had been in past spring seasons. While I was buoyed up by the excitement and promise of the season, I had to pull back and be very careful not to push my body too hard or create work that I might not be able to keep up with in the future. Recovery from an illness like this is not a straightforward or easy path. Healing takes time. It is often unpredictable. It isn’t always a linear process wherein you get better and better until finally everything is exactly as it had been before. Too often this is a false expectation that we have and since it is an “easy” narrative, it is one I see most commonly perpetuated in film, television and books. The person is gravely ill and then magically there is progress and we are shown a montage of doctors visits and days in the sun and then, poof, everything is better. What we are never shown is the in-between or the stories in which things don’t improve at all. I am still engaged in the process of healing, so I will say a few words here about the journey through the in-between. The in-between is small (sometimes painfully so) leaps of progress accompanied by days and sometimes weeks of inexplicable new challenges. It is questioning your future. It is stumbling around in the dark feeling terrified and uncertain and off balance. It is often having few answers and an endless seeking through books as well as uncomfortable and sometimes traumatic appointments with new health care practitioners for specks of knowledge that apply to your individual body. It is repeatedly running through a checklist of every symptom you have ever had and reminding yourself that things have improved because that symptom has gone, only to have it come back. The in-between is learning to accept your limitations and frailties while also acknowledging and even celebrating your strengths. It is redefining who you are, what you want from life, and finding joy and happiness exactly where you are, even if where you are is exactly the opposite of where you would prefer to be.

A year ago I wrote that by the following fall it would be as if this had never happened. That’s such a laugh to me now that I can’t imagine ever uttering those words.

Despite all I have said above, there are ways in which I am grateful for where I am. Those are difficult words to write, because they suggest, at least superficially, that I have enjoyed this experience. I can’t mince words here: I hate this. There are times when it has been brutally abysmal. And at times it still is. But where there is dark there is also light. The illness has taught me things. In many ways the lessons have not been new, but are more or less a clarification and a refocus on things I already knew or had been working toward.

For example, I have never been very good about asking for help. I have always been caught up in demonstrating my independence and strength. I can do it all myself! But I got sick in such a way that there was no choice. I had to ask for help. I had to learn to humbly receive help when it was offered. In this way I have become so much more aware of the lies that we tell ourselves about being able to do it all alone. We are by nature communal animals. We belong to each other. We need each other. This is not a weakness of the individual; just a fact of our nature. Now I find myself feeling much more gratitude for the community that I have and am figuring out how to go forward in the world in a way that puts what I have learned into action. A year ago, I was unable to imagine publicly asking for help in publishing my book, Grow Curious. A month has passed since I launched the campaign, and it is coming to an end in just 3 days. Failure will certainly come as a disappointment, but whether it is successful or not, I was able to try, and the outpouring of support, trust, and belief that friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers have demonstrated by backing it financially or going out of their way to spread the word about it has touched me at my core. The goal of the book is about finding connection through the garden and I have been surprised to find the depth of connection that has come through the process of trying to fund it.

Being sick in this way has made me a more empathetic and compassionate person. And not just to people who are suffering chronic illness. Being that frail and vulnerable made me see that I had always been deep feeling and how much effort I had been making to resist the depth of those feelings… How much I had felt ashamed of them. What we resist in ourselves can become something that we find intolerable in other people. There were times when being that sick made me as helpless as a baby. There was nothing to do but let go and accept my predicament, and that in turn meant that I dropped many of the coping mechanisms that had been constructed to protect myself from ever feeling the full depth of that. Intellectually, I have known for some time that vulnerability is not weakness, but there were parts of me that just could not let the protective wall drop. It’s still difficult, but I can be vulnerable now in ways that I could not before. I feel more joy and more sadness. I also feel more anger. All of those hard feelings that I resisted are more up here on the surface now and my relationship to them has changed. They’re a guide. I’m still a work in progress, but I am grateful for the strides that were made. In many ways being ill has been a giant lesson in letting go.

The garden has always been a great teacher. My gardens have been life learning companions in ways I never could have anticipated. One of the main lessons that I have been working on with my current garden has been in allowing the garden, and in turn, myself, to be messy. It’s not about allowing everything to fall apart, but to find balance and relinquishing tight-fisted control. 3 years ago to the month, I wrote here about this process of letting go through my relationship with the garden. At the time, I included something I had read in an Alice Walker book, “…”You(‘re) a little mess, ain’t you.” Meaning someone selfish enough to fully express her being.” I wrote about this way of conceptualizing messiness as a positive, as a way of exposing our vulnerability and fallibility and being whole people rather than overindulging in the dangerous and often limiting myth of perfection.

This unattainable perfectionism is something that I see perpetuated in the world of gardening. Perfect gardens where there are no flaws, disease, pests, or misplaced plants. Perfect gardens, perfect gardeners, and Pinterest lives. This way of being doesn’t exist naturally so the only way to attain it is through chemical means, help in the form of labour, or by putting ourselves through a certain kind of hell. It props up the idea of the garden as something to be owned and robs us of a relationship we can have in partnership with nature. It perpetuates the notion that the garden is a war zone and that we are soldiers fighting in a battle against bad insects and bad plants (weeds). Perfectionism purports to keeps us safe from the scrutiny of others, but there are terrible consequences to seeking the unattainable, the most important being a separation from ourselves. Well before the sickness, I knew this perfectionism is not real life and I wanted very much to let go of the anxieties connected with it. It is not how nature works and it is not human nature either. A healthy, holistic garden is a balanced one where so-called good and so-called bad coexist. There is loss, and death, and grubbiness, and all manner of grotesque things in the garden beside unimaginable beauty and wonder to be found. Where I had difficulty putting this knowledge into practice was in the fact that my flaws and imperfections were exposed in the public eye. There was a connection to ego that I couldn’t shake even as I pushed myself to show things honestly and without editing or cleaning beforehand. Being too ill to act on my lingering anxieties made it so that there was nothing to do but let go and accept the mess as it was. And in the process I saw a garden that demonstrated resilience as well as a burst of interesting change, new visitors, and new life.

Life is always in transition. Try as we might, things do not stay the same. From the beginning, gardening put me more in touch with the changing seasons and the ever-evolving patterns of life. In some ways, this prepared me for the unpredictable journey of healing, with its own ever-evolving cycles. Plant life ebbs and flows with the turmoil that can come from extreme, unpredictable weather and so I have tried to take my cues from them. Sometimes shit gets rough. It won’t last forever.

I can’t predict what the garden will teach me next, but I anticipate its lesson.