The Gardener Who Stopped Pruning
Short story about the difference between tending and forcing.
The garden came with the house, and with her mother's notebook. When to cut the wisteria. How short to take the lavender. Forty years of war against disorder, in pencil, with dates.
She followed it for two summers and began to dread Saturdays.
In the third summer she was ill for six weeks. The lavender went leggy and fell across the path. The wisteria wrecked a gutter. Two things she had never planted flowered by the wall.
The garden was also, she noticed, full of bees.
So she cut the wisteria back, because the gutter was a real problem. She left the lavender, because it wasn't. And she read the notebook differently after that — as one woman's taste, not a set of laws.
By September the garden was messier and more alive than it had ever been, and she was no longer at war with Saturday.
Some things grow because we tend them. Others grow the moment we stop interfering.
Ohananda.com
Tao Te Ching ch. 48 and 64
“The way of heaven is to accomplish without striving.”
A paraphrase of a recurring theme in chapters 48 and 73; the story is Ohananda's own.
Wu wei is usually translated as effortless action, but it works better as restraint: do what the situation needs, and nothing extra.
Notice what the gardener does not do. She does not abandon the garden. Wu wei is not neglect — it is the removal of the war.
Which of your rules are actually yours — and which did you simply inherit?
