I just put up my hummingbird feeder. It should have been up a couple months ago, but you know how it is with time - zip! it's gone!  With the advent of spring, lots of you planted gardens - both flower gardens and vegetable gardens. One of the most beautiful aspects of living in this part of the country is the extended growing season - it allows us to have fresh fruits and vegetables all year long, yeaaa!

One of the downsides of gardening though, are all the weeds. It doesn't matter if we're talking flowers or herbs or vegetables or fruit, at some point we're going to have to hoe, dig, trowel or spray to rid our gardens of those pesky weeds.

Weeds grow insidiously, sucking up all the space in a garden, spreading like a virus, working their way into every nook and cranny until, if left untended, they will choke out the very lovely produce we're trying to cultivate.

Our lives are like that too. We get weeds. Like the weeds of the earth, life weeds are also insidious. They can permeate our consciousness, grow roots in our psyche and cause us to make poor life choices. They can challenge our self-esteem, convince us we are unworthy and can literally choke the happiness right out of our lives.

What do life weeds look like? Wow, they can come in so many forms. They can come in the form of toxic relationships and resentments and mentally living in the Past. They can come in the form of job dissatisfaction and grudges and gossip. In fact, life weeds are actually sown in the potting soil of negative thinking and unkind actions.

Ridding ourselves of life weeds is not as easy as eliminating earth weeds. While our earth garden relies on us to water and feed the ground, our mental garden is automatically aerating, watering and fostering the negative yet fertile environment life weeds need to thrive whether we want it to or not.

The worse our self-esteem, the bigger the weeds. The more poor life choices we make, the more drama we create, the bigger the weeds. The more unkind we are to ourselves and others, the more negativity that rebounds into our life.

In fact, just like the perennial dandelion in our earth garden, life weeds are like a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom that recur year after year. If we expect our life to be small and drama filled and 'everything always goes wrong', then it will because our mind is a powerful gardener.

So how do we yank those life weeds and till a garden (life) that's full of happiness and good luck and a wealth of possibilities?

First, we have to recognize life weeds for what they are. Why our minds do this is way too esoteric for this newsletter, but if we can recognize the weeds, then perhaps we can begin taking the steps necessary to rid them from our life.

Second, we have to be proactive. The life weeds that materialize as drama often results from a lack of follow through and procrastination or otherwise ignoring the tasks that will prevent life weeds in the first place and then we misplace the blame which is the equivalent of over-watering our life weeds so they will flourish.

For example, when our children have a science project due in three months, but they don't even start on it until the day before the project needs to be turned in, then they've sewn life weeds. And when they fail because the project is incomplete or poorly done, and they blame the teacher instead of acknowledging that they were the source of the problem, then they've sewn more life weeds.

And when they get a bad attitude about school and life treating them poorly and they walk around victimized with a cloud over their heads because life is simply unfair and everything bad always happens to them, then they've sewn perennial life weeds. And the sad thing is, all of this could have been avoided by simply taking ownership and via proactive time management; working on the project a little each week until it was done.  Can you see how easily life weeds are sown? 

Third, we need to examine carefully our relationships and the activities in our lives. Do they make us happy or are they draining our energy (weeds)? Life is too short to do things that cause us to feel bad or to be interacting with people unless they add to our lives in a positive way. Saying 'no' is the equivalent of a trowel or a hoe. Just say no and pluck those life weeds right out!

And finally, recognize that a life garden is a series of choices and the consequences of those choices. Be accountable. If you opt to take a given path, accept it. If it turns out to be the wrong path, make a change. Consciously strive to cultivate a happy and weed-free garden, not one full of negative and choking weeds.

As Bill Mayer, Baseball coach from 1892-1957 once said "Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apples, don't count on harvesting Golden Delicious."

Weeding our mental garden is challenging, especially when the sprinklers break and the weeds grow rampant; it can feel overwhelming and scary and it may even seem not worth the effort because no matter how hard you try, it seems like the weeds are everywhere, reproducing faster than you can pull them.

Don't give up. Truly. Just like pulling weeds from your earth garden one at a time will eventually leave it weed-free; so too will this work for your mental garden. One step, one action, one choice toward the positive - again and again - it's all you need....