Does Your Inside Match Your Outside?

Musings on weeding, strength and turning 48.

Gardening is hard. Becoming is even harder.

The summer is moving quickly, but in a new way. This week I’m seeing “Funny Girl” with my mother and spending a night at a hotel overlooking Central Park, where we will watch Jeopardy, order room service and talk non-stop. On Friday, Ben and I will go to a dear couple’s wedding in Salem, Mass., where I will have the honor of reading a special poem I wrote for them. Then I will head to Omega for a weeklong Narrative Healing writing retreat. Next comes the much-appreciated two week TED break, during which I plan to do close to nothing other than read, garden, and ride a go-kart for my 48th birthday.

Then, the summer will basically come to an end and it will be Christmas time and New Year’s.

Fin.

Nobody warned us that the year would tick past at this rate. No amount of meditation, yoga or mindless scrolling of Instagram seems to change that. And yet, here I am wanting it to slow down, to savor this special time with friends, family and myself. For years I lived chasing the adrenaline rush of travel and work deadlines and other people’s curated lists of what not to miss this weekend. I liked that it went fast. I wore the cloak of “I’m so busy” to broadcast my worth and nearly burned out. This outfit no longer serves me. 

Maybe it’s because I will be turning 48 in August. I find it impossible to conceive of that number—it’s an odd age in general, not quite 50 and no longer in my mid-40s. Also, the person I think I am inside does not match that number, nor does it quite match the woman who shows up in my photos. Sometimes at work I find myself laughing at GenZ TikTok memes (even calling it that makes me feel old) or mooning over a Harry Styles song, my laughter the only sound I hear as we all dutifully keep our Zoom on mute, only to catch sight of my face on the screen reflecting back my near-48 years of age. How can she and I be the same?

This weekend I spent hours ripping out wild raspberry and blackberry brambles from our overgrown garden in front of the house. The bees loved the fruit flowers, but the brambles were choking out the peonies, poppies and rose bushes, along with various other plants the elderly woman who sold us the house had planted over the past few decades.

Tearing out a dozen or more wheelbarrow’s worth of this thorny and massive foliage took me hours and left me with scratches and punctures all over my arms and legs. And you know what? It felt good. I felt strong. I slept well each night, after a stressful week of work, because I worked my body and the land. Yes, the land. It felt that olde timey.

In the thicket, I felt free to be my unencumbered self, to clear away space to breathe. I felt wild as I tamed back the overgrown ripe berries and sharp thorns that scratched red lines across my arms, clearing a new chapter for the garden and myself. 

While doing the work I felt my body stretch and lift, heave and breathe. The hours went by quickly and I barely paid attention to my phone or familiar negative thoughts about my body weight, shape and tone. I asked Ben to take photos of me, because I wanted to remember how I looked when I felt so rooted and formidable. Strong.

Until that moment of grace, the number 48 was a struggle—like trying to keep a balloon from letting out its air. The disconnect between the way I felt in my body when wrestling the brambles into submission and the angst I have before my birthday tells me these thoughts are not informed by my experience, but from some outside force, a force committed to keeping me small and in my place. A voice that tells me my worth is tied to me making more room for others instead of claiming my own. 

And yet, when I go inside to connect with a sublime power greater than myself, away from outside reflections and messaging and toward the brambles, I am found. Forty-eight is no longer a heavy weight, but instead like the beauty I found beneath the thorns, a surprisingly hardy pink astilbe perennial planted years ago, still growing toward the sun, eager for another day. 

"If words are seeds, let flowers grow from your mouth, not weeds." ~ RH Swaney