One Eye on Imbolc
Right now I’m in that familiar early-season in-between where seeds are ordered, a new grow-light setup is sitting in boxes unassembled, and the landscaper is measuring for new veggie beds while nothing is actually growing yet. Mentally and emotionally, I’m somewhere between a frazzled raccoon rummaging through the garage and a caterpillar bargaining for just one more month of rest. The gardener in me is keeping one eye on Imbolc.
This is the part of the year when gardening is mostly magic and very little labor. It’s still imagined sunlight and green abundance, long evenings, watering cans, herbs within arm’s reach. Right now, none of it competes with anything else. It doesn’t cost me time or energy yet. It simply exists as the annual promised land.
Of course, that changes quickly once the work arrives.
It usually starts with something small, like assembling grow lights. Inevitably, there are instructions that don’t match the parts and screws that don’t seem to belong to anything. A moment arrives, mid-assembly, where I find myself asking why everything has to be so hard and complicated, and why the magic has to cost so much. There’s a real question buried in that frustration. About gardening, yes, but also about how much effort it seems to take to access what actually makes life feel alive.
For me, that question echoes well beyond the garden. It shows up in the house, the endless maintenance, the daily logistics, the feeling of constantly turning the hamster wheel without going anywhere. It can feel like so much energy out, so little reciprocated, and even gardening can join that race to nowhere. Once its promise becomes full reality, it demands time, attention, and sacrifice. Creative work slows down, slow mornings speed up, and the bright green joy of dirt and sun comes paired with vine borer battles, pruning, tying up wild branches, and constant vigilance.
And still, I keep coming back to it.
Because once the seeds are started (yes, Gardener, I know. Sometime around Imbolc…), I get up each morning and go look at them, fuss over them, and get embarrassingly happy about it. They don’t make the work vanish, but they do perform some pretty badass alchemy. It stops being about energy aimed at a specific outcome and becomes, almost instantly, a relationship. The moment that first pair of green leaves breaks the surface of the soil, something shifts.
There’s a reason for that, though it’s hard to explain without flattening it. The garden is one of the places where my inner world and outer world come closest to lining up. In the height of summer, when everything is growing and bearing fruit, time collapses a little. Past and present overlap, and I’m walking paths I’ve walked before, not just in memory, but in myself.
Even now, in the off-season, when everything feels like it’s still in hibernation, I can go down there, sometimes in person, walking over lumpy frozen grass, looking at bare dirt and imagining. And I go down there in another way too, visiting the summer garden inside, meeting the part of me that stays there year-round, waiting for the outside world to catch up once again.
