HANGDOG NO MORE
I’M A CURIOUS and impetuous guy. Good at thinking but terrible at remembering. And dammit if I’m not impatient. My history of jumping in and starting on ideas rather than thinking them through is legion. I suppose I just plain fear ideas falling through the cracks far more than I fear the consequences of them being bad. Or poorly executed. Or really, really bad.
Without a doubt, this is a blueprint for an extremely efficient mistake-making assembly line, and I’ve made a warehouse of them. Especially in my garden, which is where the greater part of my creative energy goes. It is where most of my thoughts and dreams manifest themselves in the form of plants and birds and rocks and things, which are all scattered around out there in the weather for everyone to see.
So, I keep cranking out the ideas and making mistakes, steadfastly keeping on keeping on, bullheadedly scratching away at the ground and hoping my next big idea isn’t another giant blunder. Amazingly enough, the more I keep at it, the better I’ve gotten. After making the same mistake two, maybe three (sometimes four) times, I usually learn. Generally speaking, my worst mistakes are no longer quite so bad and my best ones sometimes resemble art.
Therefore, as a self-appointed Grand Master of Gaffes, I’ve learned that, sure, missteps are best avoided, but everyone makes them. So it’s important that we respond to them sensibly, and this is where I’ve learned to evoke my inner dog.
For what is a dog if not the embodiment of all the best intentions the universe has to offer? Scold a dog for doing a bad thing and it feels shame for its sin not only down through the deepest depths of its own soul, but even down through the souls of all its ancestors. Conversely, if you reward a dog for doing a good thing, the joy it feels fills every one of its cells, right into its very DNA, which, now coded, gets passed on to and remembered by all its descendents.
If you put a cone on a dog’s head, even for a legitimate medical reason, the mortification it feels is monumental. Epic! In whatever units there are to measure mortification, one human unit equals seven for dogs. But here’s the thing. The minute that cone comes off, that mortification is gone. It’s over. Forgotten. And the dog will literally run around jumping for joy and immediately get on to the next thing.
When we make mistakes in our gardens, we should do the dog-cone thing. Sure, take a minute or two to Think About What You Did, but just as soon as possible, take the damned cone off! Give yourself a good shake, scratch something, get distracted by a smell or two and then move on. The clock never stops ticking, and there’s always a next potentially awful—possibly great—idea. SCOTT BEUERLEIN is Manager of Botanical Garden Outreach for the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. He writes regularly for Horticulture and http:// www.gardenrant.com. His son TOM BEUERLEIN, illustrator for this column, is an animator based in Atlanta, Ga.