Tidy...

The HOA sent the gardeners around to trim everyone's front bushes today. We had opted out in the Fall when they first said it was going to be done. But with the winter being what it was, and the workforce being what it is, the trimming got pushed to now. And in that time frame the note to skip our house disappeared.

So now all of the bushes and hedges we have out front have been trimmed up and are nice and tidy and small. All of the new growth that they struggled to gain from the over zealous trimming last year is gone. The growth Brent and I have checked on over and over to see if they really were recovering or if it was all an illusion. All of that is gone. Now they are very neat and tidy and symmetrical and small. It looks so orderly.

Ick.

It's part of why my backyard is a wild place. Why I have a TON of flowers popping up now. Why the tulips will soon be crowded into every space and the daffodils will be outside of their lines. Why I will plant random, "oh this is pretty" flowers that we see at the nursery without ever really planning on where they will go. Even though I swear every year that I'm going to make a plan.

I don't like the neat and tidy look of the front yard. That all of the front yards all look squared away like that. The grasses all have flat tops. The little trees turned into perfect pyramids. The box hedges are all, well, boxy. It's all so very unnatural.

And all of the new is gone. Any growth that was achieved has been lopped off. Now they all look the same and they all are very tidy and it looks like nothing has grown at all.

Because growth is unruly. It's not tidy. It doesn't happen in neat little boxes. You get a spurt here and there. You get a wild runner that reaches out to a new area. You don't stay in a contained space. That's the whole point of growth. And if you keep lopping it off, you never get a chance to be more.

Yeah, it's a metaphor.

Allow yourself the unruly and untidy times. Don't keep trimming off the new parts of yourself to fit into someone else's idea of what you should be. It's okay to run wild. To explore. To be more. Eventually you'll find a new shape that fits you. And if you decide that parts don't work then you get to trim them off, or weave them back into the whole, or whatever would work without you grossing yourself out thinking about pruning yourself.

Look sometimes it falls apart in the middle. I can't help it. My mind is untidy. Like my backyard. Beautiful, wild, colorful, and a lot.

Brent has already said if we move again it will be to a place without an HOA. He doesn't like being boxed in either.

Go be unruly. The world thrives on growth.