What I don’t know about gardens could probably fill a book.

And not just a regular sized novel either. My lack of knowledge might be extensive, but I still wanted to give it a try this year. I’ve been dreaming of my very own victory garden for years, so I did the bare minimum of preparatory research and gave it a try with a variety of fruit, vegetables, and herbs.

One of the things I didn’t realize about gardens is how much growth can take place in a single day. What started with a tiny seed has become little shoots that have grown into actual plants that will soon bring food to my table. I simply watered the seeds each day and began to see progress. With that progress came an enthusiasm and an opening to new possibilities.

What if we looked at our lives like gardens and our dreams as seeds? What if daily effort yielded progress and brought with it an abundance of enthusiasm and possibility? What if nurturing our dreams could make them grow and yield something we could survive on?

How to grow a dream in three parts:

Plant the seed. We need to ask the important question:What is our dream? What is it that we truly want? We can’t plant the seed of our dreams until we clarify what that dream looks like. It’s more than identifying a career. We need to know what we want our lives to look like. One way to do this is to make a vision board. We can have a visual reminder of the life we dream. We can also use Pinterest or other apps to have a visual representation, or we can make a list of what it is we truly want. We need clarification at this stage.

Care for the dream daily. Too much water can drown a plant, and yet too little water starves it. We need to take care of our dreams without killing them with our enthusiasm for quick growth. Instead, we need to find the balance by identifying the small steps we can take to reach our goals and to make sure that we do something each day that takes us closer to where we want to be.

Weeds can also choke out growth so we need to make sure that we’re staying positive and not allowing doubts, fears, and negative thoughts choke out our dreams. Instead, we need to sow a little hope with our dreams and believe that what we want is what the universe has in store for us.

Harvest the results. Eventually, we’re likely to see success when we work toward our goals. Our dreams may become reality. Or we may decide somewhere along the way that our dreams have changed. We may choose to plant a new one, which will require us to start again. But even if our dreams change, we don’t give up. We find a way to make our lives what we want because it’s important to live our lives while we’re here and not just pass the time.

I still can’t get over how much change there’s been in my small garden in a matter of a few weeks. Every day I get closer to harvesting something that I can be proud to call my own. And I think back to how I once planted, cared for, and harvested my own dreams—although I didn’t think of it in terms of gardening at the time.

However, with Spring on my mind and a garden in bloom, I can’t help but think that our dreams could certainly use the care and attention we give our gardens, or that we devote to any number of other things. Reading a book series. Binge-watching a show. Playing a video game. Watching sport. 

Whatever our passion, we devote time to it. We make it a priority. How often do we do this for our dreams? And how much progress could we make toward living the lives we want if we just took a little more time to devote to dreaming and doing things to help us live those dreams?

As I water my garden, I think about how I can better care for my dreams, or if I have new dreams that still need to be sown. And I’m confident that whenever we plant something positive, we’ll yield something worthwhile, even when it’s not what we expected.

That’s the beauty of a garden and a dream.

~

Author: Crystal Jackson

Image: Flickr

Editor: Lieselle Davidson