Tending my imaginary garden with Earl Grey

Good morning, DMV! It’s Thursday, June 11.

It has been a little over four months since the Washington Post eliminated my job in mass layoffs across the newsroom.

It has been a little over four months that I’ve been working on my Daily Dose.

It has been a little over four months that I’ve been working alone.

In the years before the layoffs, the Post newsroom was stressful. There was a pervasive sense of unease, anxiety and anger. Every day I used to walk around the newsroom to chat with colleagues and offer them a dose of calm — in hope of making our lives as pleasant as we could.

I used to talk about my metaphorical garden. I am not a real-life gardener, but the garden in my imagination was glorious. I tended it closely. I invited colleagues for tea in my garden. I told them we could tend it together and create our oasis of comfort and joy.

It has been a little over four months that my garden has been bereft of company. It has been neglected, and I suppose I forgot I even had a garden.

It has been a little over four months, and I am surprised to still feel anxious, unstable, unmoored. I’ve been focusing on knitting, yoga-ing, socializing, writing this newsletter, and yet … here I am.

Why? Is it the shift from a steady paycheck to a new life, building this newsletter and my new routine? Is it the news? I hear from so many friends, neighbors, former colleagues, readers — regardless of employment status — that they, too, feel uneasy in this moment.

On Sunday, I joined an hour-long meditation with the Shambhala Meditation Center of Washington, DC. A practitioner gave me and other newbies a bit of how-to, then we went into a room where I sat on cushions on the hardwood floor, my gaze soft a few feet ahead of me.

I settled into the moment. Birds chirping outside the windows offered a sense of safety. I breathed with the white noise of the air conditioning, feeling at one with “the Force” and envisioning a swirl of stars of a galaxy far, far away. As my mind tumbled toward anxiety, I mentally said to myself “thinking” — as I was instructed to do — and then refocused on my breath and becoming one with the universe. Yet … here I am.

It has been a little over four months, and people tell me it takes time, I’m doing all the right things. My former colleagues and former feds who were DOGE’d tell me they, too, desperately want to escape this moment and arrive in the next chapter. How?

It has been OVER FOUR MONTHS, and I don’t want to be in this moment any longer, I vented to my therapist this week. She asked me to home in on what I was feeling: What did it look like? Describe it, she suggested, then say, “Let it be.” And during this discussion, I remembered that I once had a beloved garden that gave me calm and joy.

I used to tell my colleagues that we needed to focus on that which was directly under our feet — I used my fingers to indicate a circle around myself and told them about my garden. Everything outside is beyond our control. There’s only so much we can do.

Let it be.

It has been a little over four months, and I make tea for one now. Here I am, with sweet, milky Earl Grey, in my magnificently wild, overgrown (imaginary) garden.

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D.C. resident Roberta Youmans, 72, sent me this photo in late May.

“Every spring the larkspurs and primroses take over my community garden plot in NW DC. The bees love them as do butterflies when they are here,” she wrote in her submission.

“My plot is five miles from my home. Whenever I think of giving up the plot due to the work and time involved, I am stunned by its beauty and cannot.”

Tell me your stories. Share your awe, joy and beauty. It’s graduation season. Share your photos of commencement in the DMV and your journey into the next chapter.

🎓