I’m a big fan of rooting branches from various plant or tree cuttings on my kitchen windowsill. This is nothing short of amazing for me, as I used to have a black thumb and managed to murder far too many plants by unwittingly drowning ‘em, when I was much younger.
My guilt over having caused these little deaths was substantial. I promised to learn more, and change. The upshot? My black thumb has turned green, and while not every gardening effort is successful these days, most are. Apparently, old dogs CAN learn new tricks!
I’d cut a small branch off my neighbor’s (red) Oleander bush recently, and followed specific internet instructions regarding rooting it in water. I hang on to emptied olive jars which fit nicely on my sill, specifically for this purpose.
My first Oleander cutting has been rooting, and today I noticed brand new leaves had magically sprouted! I placed it in a tiny clay pot with soil, and it’s sitting on my kitchen counter close to its familiar place, where it still receives indirect sunlight.
WHAT A JOY! As a former plant murderer, I admit to retaining a bit of gardening anorexia. No matter how many successful attempts at cultivating, transplanting and helping green life flourish around my home there’ve been, a small part of me is still a bit shocked, when my fastidious efforts yield lush, beautiful results!
Anorectics are body-dysmorphic. They view themselves as “fat,” even when they’ve become emaciated, cadaver-like bodies, with mere skin covering their skeletal structure. It’s not that I expect to fail at my gardening endeavors~ but I’m always somewhat prepared for the possibility that I might~ because this was my earliest conditioning, when I knew absolutely nothing about caring for plants!
It’s the same with humans, ya know. Early life negative or traumatic conditioning and programming from emotional and/or psychological abuse remain intact and influence us dramatically, throughout the rest of our days. A serious reprogramming effort must be implemented in order to alter self-sabotaging thoughts and behaviors that have been ingrained in us, since we were old enough to form vocabulary and speak.
When conscious reprogramming is effective (virtually eliminating the critical, shaming, guilting inner voice we’ve carried lifelong), we start to cautiously welcome good and positive experiences into our existence. We no longer feel uncomfortable receiving heartfelt, sincere compliments from others. We’re adjusting and adapting gradually to accommodating joyful, positive, light feelings, because we’ve done the challenging inner work it takes, to finally feel deserving and worthy of experiencing and retaining them on a cellular level in our body (not just in our head)!
I’ve become a darned Good Gardener~ and with each little victory, I gain even more confidence in this arena. Human growth and healing harkens from precisely this same paradigm! We make tiny, incremental gains along our path to emotional wholeness, wellness and glee. If it happened TOO quickly, we’d feel so destabilized we couldn’t endure it, and would (sadly) self-sabotage, just to restore a sense of balance that’s attended by more familiar sensations of emptiness and pain, we’ve felt lifelong.