Beneath The Weeds
I wasn’t planning to write today.
I was planning to pull weeds.
I have raised garden beds on our little 2.5 acre homestead and if you’ve ever kept a garden you know what happens when life gets busy and you step away for too long. The weeds move in quietly, one day at a time…until one morning you walk outside and the beds you planted with intention are buried under a thick blanket of green that you weren’t expecting.
That was this morning.
So, I did what any determined gardener would do. I put on my gloves and I started pulling. Somewhere in the middle of that unglamorous, dirt-under-my-fingernails work, I found her.
My eucalyptus plant. Still alive. Buried under the weight of everything that had slowly, quietly grown up around her. Suffocating. Reaching. Still fighting for light.
And I had to stop pulling weeds for a minute because I know exactly what that feels like.
The Weeds I Let Grow:
Over the last several decades I let weeds take over my life.
Not the garden kind. The invisible kind.
Overcommitment. Saying yes when my body was screaming no. Serving everyone around me while quietly running on empty. Doing too much at work. Being my best on the outside, but not feeling peace on the inside. Letting the needs and expectations of others grow up around me — one small, reasonable thing at a time until I couldn’t see myself underneath them anymore.
I told myself I was fine, this is just what life in this stage looks like. I told myself I would rest when things calmed down.
Things did not calm down.
Two years ago my health crashed. My body, the one I know so well from managing Type 1 diabetes for over four decades, the one I thought I knew, finally said enough. The years of overwhelm, living in survival mode and giving everything to everyone else was something I couldn’t ignore anymore.
I had to stop. I had no choice but to stop. I needed a reset which started me on a 3 year journey.
Through renewing my mind, learning how to choose my thoughts based on truth and not my circumstances, I started to find myself again. Less commitments. Less noise. Fewer yeses. More peace. More space to figure out what I actually needed in order to thrive. More of God and His creation.
Just like the eucalyptus.
She didn’t die under those weeds. She just couldn’t grow. The moment I cleared the weight away she had everything she needed already inside her.
I think that’s true for most of us.
Why I’m sharing all of this three years later:
I have been trying to figure out how to start sharing my story for several years.
I have started and stopped more times than I can count. I’ve waited for the perfect words, the perfect platform, the perfect moment. I’ve told myself I needed to have it all figured out before I could begin.
And then this morning a weed covered garden bed showed me what I’ve been overthinking.
I don’t need the perfect words. I just need to show up and share what’s actually happening in my life : in my garden, in my kitchen, on our farm, in my mind, in my faith, and trust that the women who need to hear it will find their way here.
So here I am. Finally. Three years of waiting and it took a Saturday morning in the garden to set me free.
Welcome to Cultivating Beautiful. I’m so glad you found this place.
Here’s what you can expect in this space: thoughts that come to me while I’m living my daily life. Recipes born from managing blood sugar for four decades. Mindset shifts discovered in the middle of hard seasons. Farm life and faith and the slow beautiful work of cultivating a life that is genuinely yours and truly believing in yourself.
No perfection. No performance. Just a girl on a mini homestead figuring it out and sharing what she finds.