Under The Overgrowth: I, somewhat conveniently, have an ambivalent approach to weeding. Weeds don't bother me in the same way they do some. A weed, a wise human once told me, is simply a plant in what we've deemed to be the wrong place. At Well Cottage 'a weed' is usually eight foot high brambles throughout a large part of the outdoors when left to their own devices and, since I prefer a walk through the garden without face lacerations at each step, digging the dirt has become a joyfully regular thing.
I like the spaces in which gardening and yoga overlap. They are plentiful. I see tending to a garden the same way as I see tending to myself: you never really know what's useful until you can learn to observe it for a while to see how it develops. Not that everything has to be useful to have its place but peer through the undergrowth, both literally and metaphorically, and it's often the stuff that seems unsightly and unpleasant at first, the stuff we want to yank out or hide away, that turns out to be the most rich in diversity or experience.
So, once a keen advocate of neat tidiness, these days I resist the urge picture-perfect everything into order and instead allow more of the wild edges in so life can take its own direction and form. Cultivating balance is skill slowly learned- and one often learned the hard way. An excess of untended overgrowth means the sun and air can't get in to do their thing but, conversely, too much meddling or over-cultivation, without coverage or shelter, and the over-exposed, over-analysed environment becomes sterile, brittle and lacking in the mucky but fertile stuff we grow from.