Tag: Rudyard Kipling

Yoga for gardeners….or Gardening for yogis?

Not my tool shed…but I wish it was!

It has always puzzled me how anyone spends devoted hours to their gardens unless they also practice yoga. I got into yoga well before I actually owned a garden, and when I did get going with the growing, I quickly realised the advantages of being bendable, stretchable, twistable and, most of the time, reasonably balanced. My first proper job in horticulture was in a large Essex nursery producing pot plants and bedding; automation wasn’t a thing then, and heavy, laden barrows of trays of pots had to be pulled to tunnels and glasshouses and the pots set down in neat rows on the floor, precisely spaced for optimum growth. Here the WIDE-LEGGED FORWARD BEND was invaluable. Wide as possible, straight back, good reach – I could set down all the plants in a tray easily without having to get up, move and bend down again. And, unlike some, I didn’t have an aching back by coffee time.

The wide-legged forward bend is the posture I adopt in the garden for jobs like seed sowing in rows, planting potatoes and harvesting strawberries. If I need further reach, it can be extended, via a WARRIOR into a LUNGE – very handy also for annihilating that far-flung weed climbing the beanpoles. When you then find there are more weeds needing removed, or hidden fruits to pick, the lunge can morph into the GECKO. From any position, being able to go into a suitable TWIST again give you more reach. I confess, I usually accidentally forget I’m in these positions and stay too long, so I hear the voice of my yoga teacher in my head warning me to come out carefully! (By which time, it’s too late…)

For the garden, the great advantage of carrying out tasks in one position is that you minimise treading on the soil and compacting it. You also need to be flexible in where you tread, and occasionally move backwards one leg in the air, to avoid squishing your spinach. Various yoga balances, which I’m fairly hopeless at, nevertheless enhance my ability to cope with a jam-packed bed or border without creating too much destruction. It’s also helpful for pruning trees and shrubs, or picking fruit. (No, however appropriate it sounds, I don’t stand in the garden doing TREE pose. My neighbours would get worried. I do it in the kitchen while cooking to keep in practice.)

In confined spaces (of which my garden has many), or for the impulsive weed-blitz as you pass by another small jungle that arose overnight with the moon, it’s very handy to be able to SQUAT and much better for your spine. Very handy for wholesale removal of sawfly larvae from a goosberry bush. too. Coming up from the squat (with an armful of weeds) is a much bigger challenge for me, or for my knees at least, so it’s good that gardening gives me the chance to practice. Even if I don’t appreciate it at the time.

“Old Adam was a Gardener, and the Lord who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees”

Thus spake Rudyard Kipling in his poem The Glory of the Garden.. Well, not half your time, perhaps, if you employ wide-legged forward bends and lunges. But some, of course, and sometimes, quite a lot. I’ve been lucky to largely avoid the “gardener’s knee” up till now and although I do get twinges these days, I still spend a lot of weeding or planting time on a kneeling mat – often one knee, the other breaking out into a GATE pose. While kneeling, I deliberately or inadvertently find myself doing the odd CAT and when I’m done, I’ll come to stand by doing DOG, if there’s space (By summer, there generally isn’t).

If you separated out the time I spend “doing” yoga and the time I spend gardening, gardening would win big time, even in winter. I’m not the most disciplined at making myself practice regularly outwith the class, and there’s far too much weeding, picking and planting to be done to attend too many classes. So my answer is to keep gardening, and stay mindful of every horticultural opportunity to utilise a yoga posture and the flexibility, stamina and good lungs yoga gives me. I’d advise any yogis like me lacking self discipline to take up gardening!

Of course, you need to finish your practice with SAVASANA, or CORPSE, the pose of relaxation. No, that’s not a dead body sprawled over the lawn clutching a trowel in one hand and a bouquet of ground elder in the other. But do take it a cup of tea in ten minutes time!

Always allow time for relaxation…

Unforgiving Minutes and the Tyranny of Time

 

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My mother liked to recite aloud the poems she learned at elementary school in the 1920s. These poems were generally heroic, patriotic, moralistic, meant to be uplifting in a time of post-war depression. Rupert Brooke, then, not Wilfred Owen. And lots of Rudyard Kipling. His famous poem “If” was one of her favourites. The last lines begin:

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…..”

The Unforgiving Minute has dogged me like the grim reaper ever since. What if I don’t fill it? What if I waste a minute – an hour – days – years? What if Things Don’t Get Done? Over the years, I have felt guilty when I’ve been unwell. I’ve developed elaborate “multi-tasking” strategies like typing up party minutes while chatting on the phone AND watching an improving TV documentary; reading books on cosmology while watching less challenging stuff like Midsomer Murders; affecting to meditate while gardening AND working out what’s for dinner. Trying to bake bread while cleaning out the shed and answering emails is why my sourdough is such rubbish. I’ve had “holidays” where each day is planned and packed with minutes full enough to be righteously forgiven. I’ve created endless, bewilderingly enormous to-do lists, for a day, a week, a year. When I’ve finished everything on the list, I tell myself, I’ll have a rest and choose for myself. That never happens. I just start on the next list.

The fashion for having “bucket lists” doesn’t help. Ticking boxes, like bagging Munros, can be fun, but distracts from living and relishing an actual experience. Sure, there are things I’d like to do before I die (Ben Lawers, talking of Munros, to see the alpine flora, if I can find someone prepared to go at my glacial pace and not make me feel like a decrepit numpty for wanting to take all day about it). But I’ve had it with compulsive list-making.

Another much-loved poem at home was A.E.Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees”.

“Now of my four-score years and ten
Twenty will not come again
And take from seventy springs a score
It only leaves me fifty more

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs is little room
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.”

However, as I’ve watched the balance of my years passed to years conceivably still to come tip, and now that I’m well on the light side of time, I observe that each of my remaining springs affords more each year than a tick-box opportunity to enjoy the blossoming of the gean, and all the other flowers in the woods. Savouring the intensity of each moment more than compensates for lack of time.

And what is time anyway? Not what you think it is. At the speed of light, time freezes altogether. I’ve read enough Stephen Hawking to dimly grasp that if I could fire myself way up into space, my unforgiving minutes would get longer, become hours even, to someone watching me through a giant telescope from Earth. But not to me; up there they’d still be minutes, because time only operates from the point of view of the observer. (Or something like that.)

So, as time is not fixed, but wavers around according to the laws of relativity and probably does something completely different on the quantum level anyway, let’s not be tyrannised by it. Let’s have more minutes with no guilt attached when we don’t fill them. More watching the clouds, less time trying to re-create them on canvas. Less grubbing around in borders and beds that will never be weed-free, more lying in the hammock watching the dandelion clocks expand and blow. More love and laughter, less – or no – time spent trying to prove it exists in our lives by frenetically posting the evidence on facebook.

More randomness – more random writing, perhaps, without fretting to meet self imposed blogging deadlines?

Loch Maree

Kipling finishes:

“…yours is the Earth, and everything that’s in it,
And, which is more, you’ll be a man my son.”

Really?? The Earth is not mine, or yours, or Kipling’s. It does not belong to the human species at all. I don’t want to own or master it and nor should any of us – we’re already proving we’re not much cop at that.

And let’s not even get started on Edwardian gender balance!