Harvest Season
Let’s be real, it’s what we look forward to in our gardens and in our lives, especially if we have planted seeds with intention, care, support and weathered the storms and uncertainty of the germination and growing process.
When I think about harvest season metaphorically, I think about heart centered seeds. Heart seeds of dreams, values and hopes. Harvest season rewards us with evidence of those heart centered energy investments. It confirms our hopes and fuels our dreams.
We celebrate fruition.
Unless you are experiencing a disappointing harvest in your garden or life. One with depleted blooms, injured or diseased crops, crops that either never germinated or died earlier in their growth cycle. Those harvest seasons tempt us to avoid reflection or even connection in any sense with what contributed to a harvest we didn’t want or expect. Of course there are factors that are outside of our control, even if we shelter our gardens filled with the seeds of our heart from storms. Even if we provide extra supports to help them weather the storms, sometimes that’s not enough and the storms will wipe out a crop despite our best efforts to protect it, to help it survive, and give it a chance to thrive.
Those are heartbreaking cycles that also provide us with opportunities to let go; to practice nonattachment to outcomes and stay engaged with a heart centered process.
Disappointing harvests are also opportunities to reflect on how you may have contributed to an outcome you didn’t anticipate.
Reflecting on your decisions and behaviors with questions like; Did I plant with intention? Or was it more with distraction? Did I consistently attune to the needs of those heart seeds in the garden, learning, fertilizing, watering, and supporting? Or did I engage in a more haphazard way, when I felt like it, because, I was busy? Was I disengaged because I was growing something someone else wanted that I don’t even care that much about?
Reflecting on your personal contribution to the harvest you are reaping builds capacity for growth, it desensitizes you to paralyzing shame by reinforcing your humanness, your flawed nature and it builds self trust. Self reflection when paired with personal accountability can become rocket fuel to build consistency in heart centered endeavors. When you become more intentional not only about what you plant but why you are planting it you then are more motivated to support those seeds into a bountiful blooming season.
This month I’ve entered a second harvest season within a year. The first, was a heartbreaking harvest season, that required acceptance of storm damage the heart seeds in this garden couldn’t withstand and reflection on how my own decisions in the planting stages influenced the probability of the disappointing harvest. It was a reckoning in which I came to understand that the new knowledge I was implementing in crop support, fertilization, and expansion, wasn’t ever going to produce the results I hoped for with this heart centered garden, the soil it was planted in was not going to adapt and evolve.
So, I changed course and utilized that new knowledge in planting new seeds, while at the same time staying consistent in caring for the emerging blooming season of one of my oldest and most heart centered seed crop.
And this November I’m celebrating the incredible blooming cycle of this aspect of my garden. I’ve witnessed the results of authentic tenacity and the true belonging that accompanies that steadfast commitment to heart seeds planted decades ago, consistently cared for, even when the care was uninformed, even ignorant to important care factors that would support the seed growth cycle more comprehensively.
These seeds still thrived.
In the blooms, I saw the strength of the roots, the impact of the learning, the fertilizing and most awe inspiring, the unique expression of these flowers in the world. It frankly took my breath away…
To witness the expression of who these blooms are separate from me and yet inextricably linked to my intention and care is an experience that confirms my beliefs in the power of love. It strengthened my own roots as a person and my vision as an intentional gardener of dreams. I’m also beginning to witness some of the newer seeds germinating into exciting seedlings of potential.
Harvest season is of course both/and.
It’s a season to celebrate the bountiful harvest and to grieve the disappointing losses. Always learning and celebrating both for the wisdom and growth potential they invite us into relationship with. What is your current harvest season about? And how are you planting your heart seeds for the next harvest cycle? Take a look at your contributions to both, it matters and so do you.
