There are a few things my garden taught me this year.
The first is that sometimes the smallest missing piece is the thing that determines whether anything grows at all.
Last year was the first summer we spent in our home. We moved in late in the season, in November, and the garden was already half alive when we arrived. Emilia brought home a little yoghurt pottle from Kindy with sunflower seeds planted inside it. We repotted them and eventually transplanted some into the garden.
Alongside those sunflowers were marigolds I’d grown from seed and trays of seedlings I’d started earlier in the greenhouse that were well past ready to be planted out by the time we really landed in our new space.
Even though we were late to begin our gardening season, the garden thrived. We had cucumbers and zucchini, lettuce and basil, strawberries and even a handful of blueberries from a very young plant. There were so many bees in the garden that they regularly found their way into the house, and I spent a good portion of the summer gently escorting them back outside again.
At one point I even had to move the honey from the pantry into the fridge because a very determined bee had somehow worked out exactly where it lived and was making multiple daily trips to help himself.
The whole garden felt alive.
This year, however, things were different. When I planted the garden this season I prioritised vegetables over flowers, the motivation there being mostly financial. I wanted the garden to be as productive as possible, to grow more of our own food and reduce what we spent on groceries each week.
So instead of planting flowers alongside the vegetables like I had the year before, I focused almost entirely on edible plants. The zucchini grew quickly, as zucchini often does — huge leaves, strong stems and beautiful yellow flowers. But the fruit never really developed.
Normally zucchini are almost magical. You check the plant one evening and the next morning there’s a vegetable the size of your forearm that seemed to appear out of nowhere overnight. Despite the lush foliage on the plant, the fruit it produced stayed small. Weeks passed and they barely changed.
So I started looking around the garden trying to figure out what was wrong. Was it the soil? The sun? The watering? Eventually I realised what was missing: bees.
Without flowers in the garden there was nothing drawing the bees in, and without bees there was no pollination. Without pollination the fruit couldn’t move from the first stage of growth to the next. So while the plants looked healthy — the leaves were enormous, the vines were strong — but without that one missing element, the whole thing stalled.
All I had was a very impressive looking plant that wasn’t producing anything.
It made me think about how often we approach change in our lives like we approach productivity in a garden. We assume the answer is more effort. More discipline, more planning, more structure, but sometimes the issue isn’t that we’re not trying hard enough, it’s simply that sometimes something is out of alignment.
In the garden, it wasn’t more watering or more fertiliser that was needed, it was flowers and it was bees. It was the quiet ecosystem that allows everything else to function.
The older I get, the more I realise that creating change in our lives isn’t always about setting bigger goals or having stronger discipline. Sometimes discipline isn’t something we even have access to. When we’re tired, rebuilding ourselves, finding our way back after a season that’s knocked the wind out of us, discipline can feel like trying to push a wheelbarrow uphill.
Alignment, on the other hand, asks something different of us. Alignment asks for discernment. The ability to notice when something isn’t working, the willingness to acknowledge when something no longer fits and the courage to adjust course rather than forcing ourselves to keep pushing forward.
Discernment allows us to recalibrate, to redirect. To choose a different path without needing to punish ourselves for the one that didn’t work.
In the garden, I didn’t need to work harder, I simply needed to plant flowers. And sometimes that’s how real change happens in our lives too. Not through discipline or rigid plans or perfectly executed goals but through a series of small observations and adjustments.
We notice something isn’t growing, we ask why, and then we gently realign.
Alignment is quieter than discipline. But when we pay attention, it often shows us exactly what needs to change.
Sometimes the signal is obvious. Other times it’s subtle — a feeling of friction, exhaustion, or the quiet sense that something in our life no longer fits the shape of who we’re becoming.
Learning to recognise those signals is a skill in itself.
Rhi xx
If this idea resonates, I’ve shared a few of the ways I’ve learned to notice misalignment in everyday life — and the small, gentle adjustments that can help us move back toward ourselves.
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