Beltane Planting Moon
Pruning allows a shrub or tree to put its energy into productive growth whether it is a stronger trunk or better fruit. It’s important to prune when a plant gets overgrown or has grown in ways that cut off the flow of air through the branches. It’s also important to keep a tree, especially fruit trees, at productive sizes, ones where the tree puts its energy into apples, cherries, plums and where the fruit can be harvested easily.
This common garden activity, however, often confronts the gardener with a task for which they feel ill prepared and perhaps a bit nervous. If I prune too much, will I kill the plant? You can. What do I take off? Why? It’s not unusual for home gardeners to skip this chore because it feels laden with risk while doing nothing seems to avoid harm.
The third phase requires pruning. Leaving a job or a career is an act of pruning. A move to a smaller home is an act of pruning. Deciding which volunteer activities promote life and which encumber can proceed an act of pruning.
Last year I set aside my political work with the Sierra Club. Today I have set aside my work at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. This is pruning, too, and the kind of pruning necessary at this point for me.
The branches that I want to grow strong are my writing and my translation of Ovid. They both require regular, sustained hours on a week by week basis. Both the Sierra Club and the MIA took me away from that concentration.
These were not decisions I made likely, nor are they decisions I made without a sense of loss. In the case of the Sierra Club I gave up my sense of political agency, long a hallmark of my life. With the MIA I’m giving up a chance to be with kids and adults on tours and the regular stimulation of art in my life. These are not trivial for me.
Yet. In this last phase of life I want to focus my efforts in ways that give me a chance to succeed, instead of scattering them in the interest of multiple passions.
