Vines

Well, we made it to Charlotte, North Carolina. After a few days of getting settled in, I started work. Work here is different than my work in Portland. So far I have been working with Josh on one major project in, what the business has come to call, the back forty. Basically, behind the barn where the wedding receptions are held, is a section (or should I say was) of nasty weed-invested, underbrushed-over, unlevel, and viney woods. Our job-clean dem woods! And…clean we did. It took us about 5 full hard days of work to complete the task; however, we finished it. Together we completely rebuilt those woods.

Spending 8 or so hours a day in the woods with vines, sticks, leaves, and some yard tools has really caused me to think a lot about my own life. Not only has my entire world been turned upside down by moving across country to a place that is culturally, topographically, cost-of-livingly, and climately different, but also my job is way different. I no longer go into nasty or clean homes. My customers don’t range from drug-using baby mommas to wealthy high class young professionals anymore; instead, I work with my brother everyday and spend a decent amount of time out in nature. Obviously this is just my job these days, and I’m certain it will be a little bit different every week from here on out. But, what I came here to say, doesn’t have to do with me working with Josh or changing my life around by moving my family, rather, I’ve come to talk about vines.

Man, we have pulled down some big vines. After we cleared out one big section of the woods in the first few days, we realized that there was a ton of growth that needed to be removed. In many ways, more than we calculated. You see vines are an interesting type of growth. Vines sprout up, work their way across the ground with little contact or disruption to it, and then climb the first object they come to thus setting a different trajectory of growth. Apart from the interesting nature of how vines grow without disturbing too much ground mixed with the little amount of energy that they need to live, vines suck! We had to pull so many vines off and out of trees. They wrap themselves cylindrically all up and around the trees. They weave their way through the smaller sticks and weeds that are on the bed of the woods. They get all tangled up in everything thus making them super hard to get rid of.

Vines use the strength of their surrounding neighbors in order to gain life and energy. I vine would die if it stayed right where it sprouted out of the ground; it needs other plants or structures to survive. But…there’s always a catch. There’s a cost. The vine’s life comes at the expense of the life of the tree or other live structure that it’s “stealing” energy from. It takes a long time and a lot of vines to destroy the life of a tree but it doesn’t take long for them to get all wrapped up in a tree taking away a lot of its natural beauty and changing its intended growth.

I definitely have some vines in my life. There are some things in my life that I’ve let go, thinking things like, “It won’t be hard to change this later.” These vines (as I will call them) have slowly worked their way up and around my life. I’ve noticed them in the last year or so and have begun to slowly cut them off. But, when you pull a larger vine off the side of a tree, it doesn’t come easy and definitely leaves its mark. I almost felt like I was hurting some of the trees as I pulled the bigger vines off of them; it was as if these vines had spent enough time with the tree that they were part of them by now. The vines grip themselves to the trees and cling so that they won’t come off easily by the wind or just natural movements in the trees.

My vines haven’t and won’t come off easily. But they need to be removed. I know it’s going to hurt. It already has begun to hurt thinking of how many vines I’ve got to get rid of over the next few years.

But, that’s why we came to Charlotte. A lot of things about our lives, my life, have changed. Many more changes await me. As I shed, rip, tear, and cut away the vines that have been “stealing” away my life, I ask that you’ll join me and dare all the more to aggressively attack the things that are waging war against you and the betterment of your relationship with the Gardener. He’ll do the hard work, we just gotta keep standing.