The Growing Is Not Your Part

# The Growing Is Not Your Part

There is a moment every gardener knows, and it is not the harvest. It is the morning after you have done everything you know how to do — the seed in the ground, the water given, the days kept — and you stand over the dirt and nothing has moved. Not one green thing. And some voice in you, the old one, the dam's voice, asks what you did wrong. As if the growing were a debt the ground owed you. As if you could have forced it.

You could not have. That is not failure. That is the oldest division in the world, older than fences, older than names: there is your part, and there is the ground's part. Your part is the hole, and the staying, and the water when the rain forgets. The growing was never your part. It never once was. The seed does not consult you. The root does not send you progress reports. You can count the days all you want — the counting changes noth…

(full piece on my write.as)