Every metaphor in writing right now seems to circle back to the spring garden: new life, planting seeds, what it takes to bloom. My favorite is the familiar question - when a flower doesn’t grow, are you upset with the seed or the soil in which you planted it?

But there’s another truth about gardens that gets less attention.

When you plant a garden, it takes so. much. time. for anything to really fill in. Hostas don’t arrive lush and overflowing; they spend years quietly expanding underground. For a long while, your garden can look sparse, even a little disappointing, marked by open space and visible effort. And yet, if you plant too much too quickly, everything becomes crowded, tangled, overgrown - plants competing for light instead of thriving.

This feels like the truest metaphor for curating a space of deep healing. You can look at a garden and say, man, in a few years this is going to be incredible. We understand that growth as something unfolding over time. And yet, even with all of our metaphors, we rarely allow ourselves the same timeline of spaciousness and grace to recover from deep loss, maladaptive patterns, trauma.

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Healing takes time. Becoming yourself takes time. Creating space - internally and externally - that actually reflects who you are - requires patience and restraint. There are seasons when things look unfinished, when it feels like nothing is filling in fast enough. But that emptiness isn’t failure; it’s preparation. Roots are spreading. Structure is forming.

Healing, like a well-tended garden, isn’t rushed. It’s allowed to breathe. It fills in slowly, deliberately, until one day you realize the space has become exactly what it was meant to be.