A Productive Mess

Ask this simple question to find surprise fruitfulness in an imperfect season.

Sep 24, 2024

If you were to see my backyard garden a few weeks ago, you would’ve found it quite messy. Weeds sprawled while my purposely planted vegetable varieties wove themselves around each other like a delicate necklace that couldn’t be untangled. The evidence showed I was busy this summer, just not in the garden. The wild growth of my good plants seemed to come more out of stubbornness or inborn resilience than from my meticulous care.

Despite the disarray, I kept visiting the cucumbers and found them quadrupling in size from evening to morning. To keep up, I made a daily cucumber habit, slicing them to dip in hummus or piling them with smoked salmon and microgreens. More slowly, tomatoes in red and yellow ripened under a canopy of leaves. I followed the scent of the herb garden and tore away a handful of mint and parsley from the overgrowth, putting them with the cucumbers and tomatoes for a Mediterranean salad.

And there’s more. For the first time, my peach tree held its fruit until ripening. (The squirrels only took a tax of 30% this year.) My blackberries, too, dotted the bohemian bushes, assuring me they were quite self-sufficient. Each time I stepped into the yard, these unkempt plants continued to offer up their gifts. Bringing my small harvest into the kitchen, I have been pleased that I planted the garden last spring even if I couldn’t hover over it this summer. Like so many areas of my life, this space has continued to grow and bear fruit even when not perfectly tended.

In this season of parenting and writing, my attention is often scattered, my inbox is overgrown, and many tasks remain undone when I lay my head on the pillow each night. There can be a temptation to lecture myself or lay awake making a mental list of things I didn’t finish in daylight. But the surprise thriving I found in the backyard this summer reminds me to redirect myself when I’m feeling inadequate. The garden gives without requiring perfection and this reminds me to look for the things that are growing well in my life and work.

It’s not that the weeds aren’t there, but it’s not that the fruit isn’t either. And that delight can stir up the energy we need for tending to the mess.

One of my writing professors taught me this lesson in my capstone course as an English major back in the year 2000 as she took a unique approach to reviewing our assignments. Instead of overwhelming us with corrections and critiques, she would first circle the strong parts of our drafts. Highlighting her favorite ideas and phrases, she encouraged us to expand on what was already good instead of focusing (yet) on fixing what wasn’t.

I use this revision method for my own drafts as well as when I’m coaching writing clients. Rather than majoring on mistakes at the start, when we look for flashes of insight or a fun turn of phrase, we feel a spirit of joy and abundance in the writing process. While the later clean-up stage is important too, early encouragement in our works in progress can propel us forward with a hopeful, creative energy. My professor’s comments planted in me a gentler way of approaching not just my writing, but my life, relationships, and responsibilities, too. Over the years, I’ve had to work hard to highlight the good and look beyond unfinished tasks or unmet expectations to enjoy what’s already flourishing.

In Perelandra, the exquisite second novel of C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, an Eve-like character on planet Venus describes the internal shift that has to happen to keep our joy when things don’t look as we hope or expect. Let these words sink in as you listen in on the Green Lady’s conversation with a visitor from Earth:

"What you have made me see…is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before—that at the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or a setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other."

We may zero in on problems and the things we lack, and we may pine for a cleaner, tidier, more productive reality, all while missing the goodness in our actual lives. And if we get fixated on the disappointment in front of us, it can end up lowering our energy for discovering or cultivating more goodness.

As a pensive writer, I often linger in ideas and ellipses and feel out of sync with the pace of my more productive writer friends. On the rare occasion that I have the privilege of focusing on just one thing for a decent length of time, I can complete projects thoughtfully, thoroughly, and creatively. But most often, this season requires me to pivot every hour or so (or every few minutes with the kids and puppy around), which is a tough set up for an already overactive mind.

But despite my meandering approach, I find myself amazed and grateful for the creative projects I’ve completed in recent years: two published books written for other authors, retreat guides, spiritual practices for contemplative activists, contributions for a forthcoming women’s devotional Bible, and an award-winning English program and curriculum for international workers in local warehouses and factories. These projects have somehow come to fruition in a day-to-day life that feels pretty scattered.

Even writing my inaugural entries for Verdant feels like a breakthrough in this messy season. This publication has been taking shape in my head, heart, and conversations with my writer friends since 2022 before it had a name. It stayed on the periphery as I established my spiritual direction ministry. It has waited while I’ve squeezed writing into the margins of parenting three kids at pivotal points in their schooling. It lay quiet in the background as I poured my words and energy into addressing things in a beloved church where we’d rooted our family for 13 years, a community we ultimately had to leave.

Like the colorful vegetables that kept popping up in my messy garden, these hard-won accomplishments in a full and complicated time of life have nourished me to keep doing the work.

Maybe your life feels like this, too: part wild, part cultivated. Circumstances may not feel optimal, yet there is still life and growth. Enjoying the surprise harvest doesn’t discount the difficulty, but acknowledging what is working saves us from being deflated by the things that aren’t. It’s not that the weeds aren’t there, but it’s not that the fruit isn’t either. And that delight can stir up the energy we need for tending to the mess.

My summer garden may not have shown it, but I do prefer a more orderly environment, one with aesthetic beauty where my on-purpose plants are not encamped by weeds. As I harvested daily gifts from the garden this summer, I became less and less avoidant of the space and more and more determined to clear the overgrowth. Finally, on Labor Day weekend, I bought a fun little chainsaw and made up for lost time. I lopped off some peach tree branches, cut back some old blackberry canes, and pulled weeds by hand among the veggie plants and landscaping. It didn’t feel like drudgery or a lost cause. It felt like I was giving back.

For me, it has been better to do it messy than to give up on the garden altogether. My garden is not perfect, but it has been green, growing, and generous. And, in a daily life that rarely feels optimal, the persevering plants assure me that something is working even when things aren’t just as I’d like them to be.

In loving the life we have, even while considering steps to more enjoyment or flourishing, we do more than tolerate imperfection: we train ourselves to look for and savor the good stuff growing in the mess. In creativity, career, ministry, or family life, when we ask first what is working, rather than being preoccupied with what feels out of control, we can infuse our senses with the beauty of the world as it is while energizing our imagination to envision what it can be.

Your turn. Consider your life as it is right now and ask: What is working? What good is growing here?

VERDANT

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