“Seeds don’t fight the darkness, they use it.“
Some days I dig. I dig to breathe.
There’s something about soil that brings me back into my body. The resistance. The bluntness. The way it asks for hands instead of words. Inside, my brain likes to run ten tabs at once. Outside, there’s one job – move the dirt, pull the dead thing, make room. It feels like mercy.
So when everything in me feels too much, I go outside and kneel. Knees in the soil. Hands in the mess. My breath changes there. I do not fully understand why. I just know it does.
The soil is blunt, honest. It crumbles between your fingers. It changes the smell after watering. It gets darker, heavier. You don’t have to overthink it; you just feel it. And without even trying, you remember you’re part of something bigger than your own head.
Maybe that’s part of why I kept returning to it. I used to think I had to understand the pain to let it go. That if I named it well enough, traced it back far enough, found the perfect reason for it, something would finally loosen. Sometimes that happened. Most of the time, it did not. Often, the most honest thing we can do is stop trying to name the ache and just let ourselves be. Be with it.
This soil doesn’t demand healing to begin. It just asks for showing up. Messy, uncertain, unraveled.
And planting asks for something even harder. It asks you to trust what you cannot see. You put a seed in dark soil, cover it up, water it, and walk away. It’s probably the closest thing to faith I’ve experienced that doesn’t require believing in anything except what seeds do.
The garden gave me a different job.
Dig. Drop. Cover. Water. The repetitive motion, the focus required, the fact that growth was happening whether I understood it or not.
Seeds don’t fight the darkness. They use it. All that growth happening underground isn’t the plant trying to escape, it’s the plant getting strong enough to handle the light when it’s ready.
Grief has that kind of private labor too. The outside of you looks basically the same. You answer emails. You do the dishes. You say yes, no, maybe, sounds good. And somewhere under all that, something is rearranging itself in the dark. Slow. Real.
That’s why I don’t see the dark part as some mistake in the process. The dark part isn’t something you just survive through. It’s where the actual healing happens as well. The messy, invisible part where your roots go deeper than you knew possible.
Every morning I checked on my plants, which turned into a way of checking on myself. What needs water. What needs cutting back. What got through the night. What did not. The wilted leaves, the new growth, the parts that never made it. All of it felt familiar in an oddly reassuring way.
Some days I sat in the garden and cried. Some days I watered things and felt okay for a few minutes. The garden never asked me to make anything of it. It did not rush me. It did not turn my pain into a lesson. It just kept its pace. Water. Light. Time. Over and over and over.
Things That Take Time
(2018, © Julia Delaney)
The garden doesn’t rush you. It doesn’t demand you “move on.” It just lets you show up as you are, day after day, until you realize you’ve been growing alongside everything else.
Be Alive 🌱
Love ❤️, Julia
Healing through Loss
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