Landscaping has never been a passion of mine. Like making the bed in the morning, to me it’s always seemed rather pointless — you go through the motions and fix the sheets, fluff the pillows, and tidy up the comforter only to climb in bed again later that night and destroy your handiwork.

Pulling weeds has always seemed just as fruitless.

Yet as I get older, I’ve begun to appreciate tasks that distract the mind and keep the hands busy. Buddhists use the term monkey mind, and mine is one manic monkey. I create whole worlds in the folds and creases of my brain, realities that have little or nothing to do with what’s true, then worry these delusions down to the bloody quick like a nervous beauracrat’s fingernails.

This spring, working in the yard has proved an effective balm for this misery. Once I pick up the clippers and the rake, shovel and spade, the universe narrows to this single instant, then the next. Time is measured not with anxiety or regret, but rather with the progress in shaping and pruning the wild lands in my yard. 

Ivy functions like the distraught mind.

The tendrils of this green disease penetrate every dark recess of our hedgerow, tangling up its roots and suffocating our foilage with its knuckly vines. At the start of this most recent project, the broad ivy leaves carpeted the earth and ran through and around every branch. The ground was veined three inches deep with tenacious fibers, some fine as human hair, others thick as sailor’s rope. 

One vine at a time, I struck back mindfully. The whole of my mental process consisted of where to sever that choking growth. Once I’d shorn off the thinnest digressions, I severed the most vital cords and deployed every bit of my strength and body weight to rip the thickest veins free of their host. 

I place value not in the finished project, which at first would seem all but unattainable. Rather, every step in this unfolding process satisfies, until all that’s left is a low wall of hedges. Then begins the reconstruction, when the shears become a creative tool and shape what once appeared mangled and defeated into a trim and beautiful work of landscape sculpture. 

Granted, as sculpture goes, it leaves something to the imagination. It’s as if Michelangelo took up his hammer and chisel after draining four wineskins and applying a blindfold. 

But that’s not what it’s about. As I work, the kids play. My wife Amy works alongside, and outdoes me. The dog sits on her haunches and regards us all skeptically. The birds are indignant, snails suddenly homeless. The brush pile of useless distraction grows, and my mind for a moment is free to shine. 

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James Faulk is a writer living in Eureka. He can be reached at faulk.james@yahoo.com.