My Heart Knew Exactly How to Feel

Tending to lettuces and love in Umbria, Italy

Nov 17, 2024

Hello friends,

Thank you for being a part of this slowly growing community.

This week has been stressful in my own life, without even engaging with the bigger changes and stressors happening in the world right now.

This has made me think about what we tend to and how we tend to ourselves when the world around us is chaotic and challenging.

Today, I am sharing a story from a time when I lived in Italy. It is about hearts, gardens, the power of nature and also what happens when love becomes twisted and doesn’t blossom as it should.

We grew a garden. This already sounds much more romantic than it was.

I was in my mid-twenties and burnt out for a second time.

After two years working rural Nicaragua, I had found a job at a well-known human rights charity in London. The office environment was difficult, I was still recovering from health issues from Nicaragua and struggling with reverse culture shock from moving back to the UK. My mental health hit a scary level of low.

After eight months of this getting worse, I quit this sought-after job to join my then-long-term partner in Italy, where we lived in a one-bedroom house, perched on the edge of an Italian town.

I got a few jobs teaching English, ate pizza and pastries and wrote poems at a small desk looking out through patio doors at the surrounding countryside while working out what to do next with my life.

And after a few months, we got engaged.

Around the same time, we planted tomatoes, lettuce and basil, in the dark stony earth of Umbria. Yet, we were not talented gardeners and the vegetables became a source of frustration between us.

What on the surface seemed the ideal life - living in this small town in Italy, madly in love and growing closer together - instead revealed the flaws in ourselves and our relationship.

He would blame me for not picking out the weeds every day and for not checking on the lettuce. The truth was neither did he, but I was learning - I was the one who was flawed: he was not to be criticised.

Instead of picking out the weeds, I would write furiously in my morning pages notebook (I was studying Julia Cameron’s Artists Way). Sitting beside the little lettuces, I would say to my notebook all the things I was afraid to say out loud.

I would tell it my confusion as to why the man I was living with seemed to have drastically changed. From being my biggest champion, he had, in a very short space of time, become my biggest critic. He must be going through a bad time, I justified.

I would tell my notebook my new fears about doing anything, as even the most mundane things, like picking up a spoon, would set his temper alight, causing him to dispense threats, punishments and accusations.

My subsequent new mistrust in even my smallest daily decisions.

This included my terror about buying a ring and my equivalent terror of saying that I did not want to go to buy a ring.

All because I did not want to know the repercussions of saying no.

He kept finding new reasons to push me into getting married quickly and I put my law degree to use, carrying out online research into Italian divorce law. Studying law had taught me good research skills but had not taught me how to advocate for myself.

Our neighbour, an older Italian man, had love enough for us both, as well as those lettuces. He would pick out the weeds when we were still asleep in the morning. His careful hands moving through the earth, always with dirt on their edges.

That garden also said a lot about my knowledge of the natural world. My desire to be close to it but my incompetency in actually dealing with it.

I was in my mid-twenties and did not have the patience nor the sense of routine that tending to this little patch of Italian earth required.

I was happy to enjoy the salad in my dinner, less happy to spend a portion of each day picking at the weeds, which seemed to endlessly multiply.

Perhaps this also said something about our relationship, those ferocious weeds, which showed themselves more determinedly each month. Given that my body was so tense, in a constant state of flight and fight. Given that I started to lose hair from the stress of tending to the needs of my partner, perhaps it is no wonder I had very little left to give to the vegetables taking root in that soil.

What we couldn’t see beneath the surface.

I have since learned that a garden needs our regulation as much as it needs our attention. It needs our sense of balance. Our neighbour had his own sorrows, but he had tended to them already, much like he tended to the earth. And looking back, I realise, nature could have been my guide to emotional wellness. If I had let it.

But, I did not yet know how to listen to myself, I did not know this was a skill. So, how could I have cared for the little garden, when I was unable to defend, let alone tend to myself?

After the relationship was over - which is a simple way of telling a much more complicated story - I pulled out what was left of myself, crawled away, returned the ring and one day I went back to visit my neighbour, who showed me what had become of our vegetable patch.

A problem with the sewers, he had ripped open the whole garden with determination and a shovel. Where there was once a dinner for two, there was now only earth - a gaping wide hole which ran deep into the hillside.

Sometimes life provides you with metaphors which are far too obvious.

My heart knew exactly what to feel.

It had already felt it.

Do you have times in your life when you were working on something external instead of listening to yourself?
What lessons have you learned about finding the balance between tending to yourself and the world around you?