My Garden

I enjoy gardening ever since my childhood days. I enjoy watching plants growing.
I especially enjoy watching the plants when it rains heavily.
After the rain stop, you can see the plants waking up as if smiling widely. It never fail to lift my spirit.
Such a wonderful sight... Masya Allah..

There are many different types of garden. Some require less maintenance than the other. But there's no such thing as maintenance-free garden.

Taking care of our garden requires a lot of patients and perseverance. The normal routine of watering, trimming, pruning, fertilizing and weeding can be a tiring job if they're not done regularly.

Of all the gardening routine, to me, weeding is the most crucial. Of course watering is important but some large plants that has grown for many years does not require watering anymore. But the beauty of our garden depends on regular weeding. We can have a tiny garden or a large garden with many plants, but if the garden is full of weeds, it is such an eyesore.

Any unwanted 'plant' that grows in our garden can be considered as weeds. To maintain a nice green lawn requires persistent weeding. A tiny weed that grows in our lawn can go unnoticed and suddenly this culprit has taken over the beautiful grass.
Therefore weeding has to be taken seriously. It's a lot easier to pull a tiny weed than a full grown one with a long vigorous root. Some weeds are really stubborn, grows very quickly and will keep on coming back. It's quite difficult to get rid of them especially if they grow between plants.
But if we leave them, we would end up having a garden full of beautiful plants amidst the messy, ugly weeds.

Reflecting on our life, weeds actually exist everywhere. Our hearts can be covered with weeds too. Negative thoughts, insincere intentions, wrong perceptions, these are some of the persistent weeds that usually grow in our hearts. It's always easier to erase negative thoughts at the earlier stage, before it becomes an intention, then it becomes an action and if the action is done repeatedly it can become a habit. A negative habit is like a full grown weed deeply rooted in our beautiful garden.

Many times we find a physically attractive person, but his/her ugly heart radiates an unpleasant aura to the surrounding.
But when we look at a little baby whose heart is so pure, our hearts melt at their smiles and innocent look, just like a garden with fresh green lawn free of weeds.

We need to do regular weeding of our hearts and we need to do it at the earliest stage possible lest it covers and infest the heart beyond recovery. And just like the garden that looks so refreshing after a heavy rainfall, maintaining healthy hearts also need some rainfall in the form of tears of repentance.