Garden Inspired
Christmas this year arrived quietly.
Not with absence, exactly, but with less. Fewer people. Fewer moving parts. Fewer expectations to manage. My sister’s family was sick. My older kids stayed in Colorado with their mom. What would normally be a house full of twenty or more people settled into something smaller, tighter, more intimate. The kind of gathering where you can hear each person fully. Where conversations do not stack on top of each other. Where silence is not awkward, just present. Where you notice the pauses.
It was relaxing in a way I did not realize I needed. Beautiful without being busy.
The day after Christmas, everyone headed home. The dishes were done. The chairs were stacked back where they belonged. The house returned to its usual rhythm. I assumed I would head straight into the woodshop. Like the studio and the metal shop, it too was unfinished, unsettled, not quite complete. There were projects waiting. There always are. Instead, I went outside.
Sixty-five degrees the day after Christmas does not feel right. Not in Nebraska. But it offered its own kind of permission. I told myself it would just be a little cleanup. Trim a few things back. Deal with what had been quietly nagging at me all fall. But the yard and the garden had other ideas.
Garden Inspired
Volunteer trees had taken root where they did not belong. A ten-year old almond that never fully recovered from disease stood as a reminder that not everything can be saved just because we have invested time in it. A thirty-foot cottonwood had grown tall enough to block light and air from an entire section of the garden, doing no harm intentionally, just taking what it needed. And then there were the vines.
Wild wisteria tangled into woodbine. Grapes long past their productive years weaving themselves into the mix. Together they formed a dense living wall that had slowly closed off access to the back of the garden. It was one of those situations where avoidance allows complexity to deepen. The longer it sits, the harder it becomes to name where one thing ends and another begins.
Coiled Vine Drying
Four hours with a chainsaw and a machete finally opened a path through. Not neatly. Not elegantly. But enough.
By the time I stepped back, there was a forty foot long slash pile three feet high and three feet wide waiting for the city to haul it away. A twenty four foot dump trailer filled with compostable debris ready for the city compost heap. Barrels and barrels of leaves added to our own pile so the chickens could work them over winter. The garden was far from ready for planting, but it could breathe again. That mattered more than progress.
Somewhere in the middle of all that cutting and clearing, something unexpected happened. I slowed down just enough to notice what did not need to be discarded. Long strong vine material. Grape. Wisteria. Woodbine. Instead of tossing it onto the pile, I cut it into ten foot sections, coiled it carefully and set it aside to dry. Not because I had a project in mind, but because I could imagine one. Baskets, maybe. Sculptural forms. Something tactile and slow. Potential does not need a deadline to be worth saving.
Vines in Garden
Later that evening I read an email from a maker I follow. She wrote about what rest looks like for her. Not stillness, exactly, but play. Small impractical projects. Knitting something whimsical she might only wear wandering through the woods. Making tiny things that do not need to justify their existence. Letting glitter show up without apology. Still outlawed in my studio, but I appreciated the sentiment.
It landed because it named something I have been circling for years.
For a long time, I believed rest meant stopping. Sleeping more. Sitting longer. Doing less. And while sleep absolutely matters, I have learned that it is not the whole picture. There are other forms of exhaustion that sleep alone does not touch. Deeper ones. Quieter ones.
Some things restore us more deeply than rest. They reconnect us to the heart of who we are. To curiosity. To making without outcome. To work that does not announce itself as productive but somehow leaves us more whole. Clearing a path through the garden. Saving vines without knowing what they will become. Letting one space wait because another is asking, softly but insistently, for attention first.
Vines in Garden
This past week, rest looked physical. Intentional. Quietly creative. It looked like choosing the yard over the woodshop. Like allowing my hands to stay busy without demanding a finished result. Like letting the greenhouse remain cluttered for now because the soil needed tending first. And yes, putting studio projects on hold even though an entire day could have been spent on them. That, too, was okay.
As retirement edges closer, these choices feel less like detours and more like practice. Practice listening instead of pushing. Practice noticing what actually replenishes me rather than what looks responsible from the outside. Practice understanding that productivity does not always mean building forward. Sometimes it means clearing back. Making room. Letting light reach places that have been shaded for too long.
There is a temptation at this time of year to rush toward resolution. To name goals. To optimize. To fix. But standing in the garden, covered in dirt and sawdust fragments, it felt clear that this season does not need grand declarations. It needs permission.
Permission to play. Permission to do something impractical. Permission to tend neglected spaces without immediately measuring the effort. Permission to trust that small quiet acts of care are not wasted time. It is a different way of living creatively.
For me, right now, that permission looks like coiled vines drying in the corner. A garden slowly returning to balance. A greenhouse waiting its turn. A woodshop that will still be there when the timing is right.
This feels like a good place to begin the year.
Overgrown Vines Being Gathered
