I am learning a lot about gardening and soil quality and its huge influence on growing things:
when the soil is good, gardening is easy; when the soil is bad, gardening takes lots of work. Work that will usually pay small dividends, if not fail.
Our lives are like soil. Get really good soil; focus on soil health and plant health will follow. The plants in healthy soil can weather all sorts of pests or storms.—hi
So,
How is your soil?
How is the environment of your home?
Healthy environments start with healthy adults.
We need to be aware of the input we are giving our bodies, our minds, and our spirits
so we can have more control over what is outpouring through our words, actions, and feelings.
Those in our environment can only be as healthy as we are ourselves, so we owe it to everyone to be as healthy as we can be to benefit all those around us. Healthy adults prioritize self-health by making time and space for adequate personal energy, adequate personal growth, and vulnerability in personal relationships.
Adequate Personal Energy:
We’ve all seen children transform from sweet, patient, and compassionate to violent, irrational, and oblivious to others. Often it is their bodies signaling a need for increased energy input: sleep or food. Put those back into the child and the sweetness returns.
The same is true for adults who have the same needs of deep, adequate sleep and good, sustaining food but are better at masking the symptoms . . . for a time until it explodes in sickness, emotional outburst, or depressed withdrawal.
This is back to the basics but a foundational truth many of us skip over. Lack of energy can cripple us—and our kids—setting us up poorly for living full, happy lives. We need to hear our body’s cries so we can meet its basic needs.
Adequate Personal Growth:
School eventually ceases, and for many adults, this end of school has subsequently stopped motivation for growth. This lack of motivation ends with brains being fed lousy “food.” Our brains were made to work. They are healthiest when learning at a highly concentrated level: trying new “experiments,” training in a new language or instrument, going new places, diving into history, absorbing new ways to live, engaging in memorization.
When we fail to learn, grow, and feed our brain well, the brain “learns” stagnancy and in turn grows what we often term “old.”
This “old” brain, which doesn’t seem to work as well as previously, is really just a stagnant brain. Feed your brain well. Then rest it well. (That usually means not in front of a screen!)
Vulnerability in Personal Relations:
Henry Clay Trumbull states in his child-training book, “Every child has the instinct of faith, as surely as it has the instinct of appetite. The inborn impulse to seek nourishment is not more real and positive in a normal child, than is the impulse in such a child to cling to and to trust another. Both instincts are already there, and both need training.”
Humanity has an appetite to connect and to trust. The question is not whether we will trust but rather where we will place such trust.
Where adults place their trust, in both human friendship and the Divine, will directly affect our overall health. Is this trust in one who is faithful and trustworthy or flighty and unstable? Is this on dependable and available or far-off and unwilling to give of time? Or is the whole world an enemy and the only one trustworthy is one’s self? Without connections—healthy, loyal connections—a person is unstable and vulnerable in this world of constant change.
So . . .
How are you treating your wholeself?
Which category of your soil needs some attention?
It takes patience, time, and healthy compost input to make healthy soil teem with life. However, even the slightest improvements in soil will exponentially increase your yield. The first growing season may show just tiny stubbles of growth. Be patient. What you’re cultivating is below the surface. Continue growing. Embrace the changes within. In coming seasons, the yield will begin to be seen.
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