Patience

I don't have any.

People will often see me knitting, or see something I have knitted, and say, "I don't have the patience for that." Thus implying that I have lots of patience if I knit. Students will tell me that I have a lot of patience, and people who know I teach will also assume that I am a patient person.

I'm not!

I knit because I don't have patience. I like to feel productive during waiting times. Knitting also helps me keep my mouth shut when I am feeling impatient and wishing that other people would get to the point. It keeps me from interrupting and makes it easier to keep my vow to listen better and more completely. This is the biggest reason I knit during meetings at work. Oh, I still interrupt and my mind still skips around, but doing something with my hands lessens it. There are many other reasons that I knit, but having patience is NOT part of it.

My profession is not an indicator of patience either. It isn't patience that helps me with students who STILL don't understand after many explanations. It is curiosity. What does it look like inside their brain? That is what I am thinking when I explain something for the fifth time! How are they thinking? This is far from patience. Maybe the opposite of patience. When students don't understand it gives me more to do. Not just explain, but figure them out. Analyze what I am thinking vs. what they are thinking and try to reconcile this.

All this is to explain that the planting that I am doing this summer is frustrating. I am happy to have started planting the native plant hedgerow. I've got two areas that are well on their way and a third where the tall screen plants have been planted. There is a lot of satisfaction when we have a new area cleared and planted. The problem is that everything is so small. (The tallest of the "tall" screen plants is currently about 4 feet and the rest are all under 3 feet tall.) Patience is required for plants. Especially for native plants, I think, since I have been told that natives that get too big in nursery pots often don't do as well as the smaller ones once they are actually in the ground. I also have to resist the urge to crowd the plants together so it looks more full at the start. Native plants need room and don't always do well if they are crowded. So all the plants look really tiny and now I have to wait. Arrgh!

Yesterday I actually considered getting out the tape measure to see how tall they are so I can measure progress from week to week. Sad. Maybe I should just try to learn something from my plants...