Health Care Lessons from a patch of Grass

I don’t see the point of having grass around my house. We don’t have goats, or sheep or anything to eat it and I don’t care what other people think about my lawn.

The flower garden that my wife keeps up is beautiful and pristine. It is my self-declared job to take care of the grass. Taking care of it could also mean destroying it.

For years I’ve been trying to kill it. I’ve stopped watering it in the hot summer even though we have a sprinkler system installed. Years ago I stopped spraying dandelions or adding fertilizer or doing anything to it.

The problem is the less I do the better it looks and the more it grows. It’s getting very weird. I had a bunch of dandelions pop up a week ago and after cutting the grass a few days later they DIDN’T come back. I had hoped they would and gradually take over the front and back lawns but they kind of stopped blooming.

The grass is getting thicker. This past winter a skunk or something started digging it up looking for grubs so I thought this could be it. A few more of those and presto I would be relieved of my lawn cutting obligations. But no, where the turf was removed I had just rolled it back and the grass is growing better than ever all over the place. Not weeds, golf fairway type grass.

But what if this whole lawn thing is a lesson in environmental-healthcare-beekeeping (more on that in my next blog) management. What if the solution to many of our problems is to just let it “work itself out”. Letting nature take its’ course when it comes to understanding a problem by first considering the whole nature of the object, or organism or person. Maybe nature can help us fix many of our problems if we respect and listen.

Somehow my lawn is reaching the state of balance. My grass grubs are eaten by some animals that then make the grass stronger. The grass when mulched (I never rake the lawn) seems to act as a fertilizer-weed suppressant kind of thing.

I don’t really know but I do think the lawn I have can teach me a great deal as I try to work through some problems of bee mites, concussion recovery, ADHD, Chronic Pain and a Auto Immune Disease.

There’s something it’s all trying to tell me and I have to work harder at listening, observing and just letting it happen.

If I can’t kill my lawn by ignoring it, perhaps it’s time to sit up and take notice of what it is trying to teach me?