Earlier this week, Reese Witherspoon posted about a friend offering her the chance to take a moment and feel all her difficult emotions. It's been a rough ... week? Month? Year? MANY years? Fill in the blank.
Sometimes what we need is just to unplug a little. For me, the heaviest thing on my heart is that after so long, after so much excitement and so much anger and so many emotions, we're left with all older white men in the race to be our next president. I felt sure that we'd see change this year. I was sure that a woman who would excite the masses would be on the ballot.
My Queen Elizabeth bowed out, but I have no doubt that she'll continue to do great things for all of us. There is hope in the future, always. I will never not feel that the women in this race were robbed of their chance to lead, yet again, because of their gender.
Whatever your reason may be this week: coronavirus, politics, still more news about racial injustice, sometimes what we need in the way of self-care is to take a beat. If you've been listening to the pod for a while, you know that gardening is my self-care and the passion that I refuse to try and monetize, against the consistent nagging of my millenial mind.
So when I say that I was excited to read this article from the Ringer about British gardening shows on Netflix, I'm actually understating my feelings quite a bit. I was ecstatic! It's been amazing to zone out but still feel like I'm learning something with my kids (because they love to watch too, and the shows are appropriate for kids! Which checks the boxes of entertaining and educational for all ages.)
In Love Your Garden, Alan Titchmarsh and his team bring a garden makeover to the back yard of someone who works hard and loves to be outdoors, but hasn't been able to provide the garden that they love for themselves. The show reminds me a little bit of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in that the families are so extremely deserving and so in need of some help and compassion. It's a great way to educate my kids on the the differences of people.
A show like this is a good way to avoid a sitaution wherein your children point and loudly ask about someone's differences in public. It pre-educates them before they see someone who's slightly different than them in line at the grocery store and innocently (loudly) point and ask about it. Exposing them to things on a tv show is a good safe place to have a conversation, because there's no need to shush them or make them feel like there's anything wrong with curiosity, or that there's anything bad about people who are different.
In Monty Don's French Gardens, you get beautiful gardens plus French history lessons. Yet another educational foray for my kids and I. I've already learned about the famed gardens of Versailles and I can't wait to learn more.
And I think we can agree that British tv is just better. Let's face it: they've got better accents and they sound genuinely happier and more joyful just in the way that they speak. "What a surprise" from a British person makes you tear up. "What a surprise" from an American person sounds like sarcasm. I don't make the rules; that's just life.
We can't use things like this to forget the world around us; it wouldn't be responsible or ethical. The future needs us to be involved. But what we can do is recharge. Unplug, gather ourselves, and get a little glimpse of "the healing power of the garden." (-Alan Titchmarsh)
