What Lies Beneath

Nothing has brought home the significance of my move back to country life more   than the weather. Between the record-breaking cold and the endless snowfall of this past winter, followed by so much spring and summer rain that we are constantly on flood watch, it has been quite a homecoming. Couple that with finally having a real garden again only to have my hands tied every few days by all this rain, and it is no wonder that when I have a moisture-free day, I waste no time in pulling on the gloves and going out to pull the weeds that are the only things enjoying this weather!

Outside where the blacktop of the driveway meets the cement of the entrance to my place, a wide crack has opened up due to the intense cold we had this winter and the massive amounts of snow and ice that kept dripping off the overhang above the doorway. While we wait for suitable weather for that to be repaired, a mass of green sprang up in that crack until it took on a life of its own. From beneath the concrete, blacktop and stone came clover, dandelions, grass, and a vast array of wild-growing things I didn’t even recognize. I have to admit that I admired the tenacity of Mother Earth and her plant children to plug away under that concrete patiently waiting for the opening they needed to push through. Alas, they eventually grew big enough that I was stepping over them carrying the groceries in, which meant that they would have to go before I or someone else got a sandal caught in them and took a tumble. So I waited for a dry morning and went out to perform the sad deed. What I found when I pulled up the plants by their roots was a whole other world. Worms, beetles, bugs of all shapes, sizes and colors started to scatter, some moving up and out in search of greener pastures and some digging deeper into the sodden soil. You just never know what lies beneath until you pull the weeds out of the way to get a better look.

The same is true of our lives. Sometimes the storms of simply living leave a lasting impression, and around and in that impression it’s easy to let limiting beliefs and untruths take root. If we’re not careful, they will grow so big that they trip us up and make our path difficult to travel. However, if we take the time to clear out those limiting beliefs and look at what lies beneath, we will be amazed at what we find: new ideas, new perceptions, new experiences, and a whole new appreciation for life. Even if we have experienced what feels like an endless winter of pain and heartache, if we dig deep enough, there is always a new life waiting for us to come out of the hole and set out on a new path.

I have to admit that I will almost miss that crack in the pavement when it is finally filled in. Every day when I go outside I look down to see which of my little crawling neighbors is at home and bid them good morning. I know, though, that even when I can no longer see them, they will still be there, patiently waiting for their next opportunity to burst through and thrive.

And so it is. 

A Lesson In Being-ness

I sat down to write this week’s post only to find that the Internet was down. It’s not even raining or storming for a change. So rather than get myself all worked up, I did what I usually do to reign in my tendency to blow things out of proportion … I went outside. I find that a little time spent just standing outside with my fellow beings, be they plant or animal, will almost always bring me back to center.

This morning I stood and watched a bunch of tiny bees doing their thing in the garden. Have you ever taken the time to really watch bees at work? It is a humbling experience. Methodically, with a focus and an instinct passed down for thousands of generations, they move from flower to flower taking what they need and pollinating as they leave before moving on to the next bloom. In all the years I’ve been gardening, I’ve never seen bees fighting for position, or for the best flower, or for any other reason. Why? Because they’re bees, and they do what bees do. They are comfortable in their bee-ing-ness.

Birds spend their lives being birds and doing bird things like building nests, flying and finding food. Bees collect nectar, leave pollen behind, and make honey. A bluebird isn’t jealous of an eagle. A bee doesn’t obsess over being born a bee instead of a dragon fly. They are perfectly okay being who they are and doing what they do. It’s only we humans that aren’t content to just be. We obsess over how we look, what we have and what we want. We’re jealous of anyone who has something we don’t. In pondering this difference between humans and other living things it occurs to me that the reason non-human beings don’t behave the way we do is because they don’t know they can be anything else but what they are, and herein lies the answer for us. We do know that we can be something else.  What remains to be seen is whether we can choose to be our most authentic selves or copies of someone else. There is a great treasure in just “being” if we would only sit still long enough to connect to it.

As for me, I have been informed that our Internet will be down for several days while they make repairs to the wires outside. So I am writing this out long hand in anticipation of the day when I can post it, because I am a writer and that’s what writers do – they write. I am “being” me. Who are you being today?

And so it is. 

What's In Your Package?

All of the rain we've been having has set my gardening schedule back a bit. I guess I've forgotten how frustrating it is when you are gardening in an actual garden and Mother Nature determines what goes on out there, not me. When I was container gardening on my porch, I took the role of Mother Nature and made all of the decisions about what went where, how much water each thing got, and what was in each and every pot. Which brings me to my latest dilemma .. an unmarked packet of seeds. I found them in the bottom of a little gardening bag that I keep seed packets in. They must have fallen to the bottom. All that is there is a little white packet that was obviously inside a larger packet with the name of the plant on the outside. There is nothing remarkable about those seeds that would help me to know what they are so that I know what to do with them. If I don't know what they are, I won't know the best place to plant them so that they can grow into all that they can be.

I came across a quote from Parker Palmer this morning that struck me as being an example of this very phenomena in humans: "Before you can tell your life what you want to do with it, you must listen to your life telling you who you are." I think women have a harder time with this then men do. We go through our lives fulfilling a number of roles - daughter, sister, girlfriend, wife, mother, grandmother - as if we were a progressive garden planted so that when one season is done, the next one takes over. When do we actually get to sit down and ask ourselves who we are so that we can determine what we want to do with our lives?

For years, I struggled with the idea of wanting to become a writer. It wasn't until I read something by a fine young writer names Jeff Goins that I realized I would never "become" a writer until I started saying, to myself and everyone else, "I Am A Writer." Once I finally listened to my life telling me who I was, I was finally able to decide what to do with it. Now, almost three years into my blog and two published e-books later, when life (or anyone else) asks me who I am, I tell them, "I Am A Writer." Writers write. That's what I'm doing with my life.

The same holds true for gardeners. Gardeners garden. So this gardener will put a few of those seeds in a little pot and experiment with them in different lights until they can hear their own inner voices telling the who they are. Then they will do what they were meant to do: grow up tall and reach for the sky.

And so it is.

Color My World

I read an article not long ago about a woman who said she planted the garden off of her back porch in all white flowers. Her reason for doing so was so she could sit on her porch at night and see her flowers lit up in the moonlight. As lovely an image as that makes when you think about it, my own reaction was that you would only be able to enjoy that for a couple of hours in the evening. There are 24 hours in the day and, as we have just come up on the longest day of the year, I would much rather have a garden that was bursting with color that I could enjoy for the majority of the day, not just a few hours in the evening.

How dull our world would be if everything was a matter of black and white. There would be no golden sunrises filled with promise, no purple and pink sunsets to bid the day goodnight, no lush fields of green, or stalks of plump, yellow corn, or luscious red strawberries on the vine, or a million and one other colorful experiences that would be missing from our lives.

It is much the same in life as it is in nature. To simply survive is to live in a world of black and white, right and wrong, yes and no. To actually live a life is to burst through between the lines and savor all the color and experiences life has to offer. So often we are raised with such a rigid set of rules to live our lives by that we grow up thinking, "well, that's all there is." It reminds me of the movie, "The Wizard of Oz" where Dorothy's life in Kansas is all black and white until she lands in Oz, and then she opens the door to a world alive with color and experiences she could only dream of. Sometimes we have to step back and look around us and ask ourselves if we are just surviving from day to day, or if we are experiencing all that life has to offer. This also includes experiencing all the different people in the world as well. Some of my most memorable and lasting impressions of life have been through the eyes of people of color and different customs. I now cannot imagine my life without the dancing and drumming of my Native American ancestors, or the meditation of my Buddhist brothers and sisters, or the restorative yoga movements learned from my Hindu relations, or the uplifting, heart-bursting gospel music of my Black friends and neighbors. All of these colors, all of these cultures, have colored my experience of life in a palette only God could create. How dull my life would have been without them.

This morning as I worked in my garden, I noticed a spot that was not doing well due to all of the rain we have had lately, a spot that needed some color. So I rummaged through my collection of flower pots (even here I gravitate to colorful designs) and dug up some lavender to put in them, arranging the pots in between the muddy spots.  Now while the spot does its best to dry out and, hopefully, be ready for some new plantings, it will still have some color from the greens and purples of that lovely herb. Sometimes even Mother Nature can use some help coloring the world.

And so it is.

Perspective Is Everything

One of the greatest gifts I've been given since moving back to the country was the opportunity to get reacquainted with how life flows out here. It came to me the other day as I was looking out of the kitchen window that if you want to change your perspective on life, just look out of the window. For example:

This was the view from my window in January ... and February ... and March ...

Tulips appeared in the same window in late May, and ...

...look what I found last week when I opened the window ... strawberries!

Someone sent me a quote on Facebook today that said: "People are always fighting over whether the glass is have empty or half full. What they seem to forget is that the glass is refillable." Perspective is everything. What you see today doesn't always have to be what you see tomorrow. It's all in how you look at it.

And so it is.

Writing Your Own Fairy Tales

No horror story can scare us as much as the ones we create ourselves. No one is better at playing the big bad wolf in our own lives than we are. We are the monsters under our own beds or the ones hiding in the closet.

Take yesterday, for example. I have been in a great deal of physical pain for the past few weeks. Of course, throwing myself into my new garden with the abandon of a 20 year old with no thought to the three pins in my upper leg from last year's surgery didn't help. Imagine my surprise when the pain got to the point where even riding in the car to the store was an experiment in torture! Of course, the horror story I told myself was that I had waited all this time to move back home only to be denied my dream because I was probably going to need a whole hip replacement. Not only that, but I would probably never be able to garden again! What was I thinking at my age to go around digging and bending like that? Now for the reality - an ice pack and remembering to do my stretches every day (which of course I wasn't doing), and a little rest, and I was good as new. All I had done was to aggravate my sciatica which I've done before, sometimes by simply bending the wrong way to plug in the sweeper! Nevertheless, I went right for the drama instead of stepping back, taking a breath and assessing the situation for what it was.

The same was true for a meeting that I had to attend. I had already made up my mind that it was going to be stressful and I would probably come home with a splitting headache (to go with the pain in my butt that I already had), Surprise! It turned out to be a very inspirational and gratifying meeting, and I came home filled with hope for the future of my little church group.

So, I've decided to stop writing horror stories and start writing fairy tales. When a stressful event or person crosses my path, instead of always imaging the worst, I can turn on my inner magic wand and change the way I imagine the story ending. The meeting will go well because I will fill the room with love and positive energy, and bless everyone in the room. The pain in the butt can be avoided by doing my stretches, finding less invasive ways to garden that respects my body's limits, and congratulating myself for the beauty that I help to create - okay, Mother Nature does most of the work, but how cool is it that I get to be her helper? What a great fairy tale that would make: Mother Nature's Helper!

So what kind of story are your going to write for yourself today?

And so it is.

It Ain't All Sunshine and Flowers, You Know!

It's raining again for the second day in a row. Actually, it started Saturday night when a storm blew in that knocked our power out for over 2 hours before it came back on. Sunday morning I threw on a jacket (the temperature had plunged down to around 53) and rescued the pots of seeds that I had just started on Friday when it had been sunny and 80! I hoped the drenching they got, along with some seedlings I had also planted that day, would not kill them outright, but as my hero, Henry David Thoreau, always says, 'I have faith in a seed."

Talking with an acquaintance about this the other day, she asked me,"Why do you even bother? All that work, all that money invested, and all the strain you're putting on that poor hip of yours (referring to my injury from last summer that still plagues me). All of that can be blown away in a single storm. I don't see what you get out of it." Well, I'll tell you what I get out of it and, of course, my answer will also be a metaphor for our lives (did you really expect that this would just be a post about gardening?).

What I get out of it is the chance to feel as one with the earth and everything on it. I get to be a witness to the miracle of life in all its forms. I get to watch a seed become a seedling, then a plant, then a flower or vegetable or herb, then end up on my plate. I get to follow the cycles of the seasons through my garden, watching the animals harvest and store for the winter, or fly by the hundreds over my heard to warmer winter homes. Do I sometimes get discouraged? You bet. It ain't all sunshine and flowers, you know. Sometimes it's disappointment, or flat out failure. I've lost count of how many times I've lost veggie plants to the weather, or flowers to the nibbles of my animal neighbors. I've even had almost a whole garden destroyed by hail.

Life is very much like gardening. We plant the seeds for our dreams and work like heck to see them germinate and blossom. Sometimes our storms are small and we can weather them. Other times they are catastrophic and we watch in horror as our dreams are destroyed. In that moment we come to understand that how we determine our next move will determine how we will live the rest of our lives. It is so easy to just throw our hands up in the air and walk away. Some would say that would be the sane thing to do, but since when are the dreams of our hearts always sane to other people who cannot feel the longing and the calling from our spirits? Last year, I lost my job, lost my health insurance, fractured my hip and shoulder, and was ready to just give in to it all and go live with one of my kids like a good old decrepit grandmother. Thankfully, that dark cloud only lasted about two weeks. By the time I was up and about on my own two feet - plus a cane - I was already asking myself how I could take those lemons and not only make them lemonade, but make the best lemonade I had ever tasted.

So here I am, watching the rain come down on the garden that I waited 15 years to get back. Actually, we needed the rain. We haven't had a steady rain for a long time and the earth needed it. Sometimes a little rain is a good thing. It washes things clean and gives us an opportunity to start over like new. I'm checking my box of seed packets just in case I have to replant anything, but I suspect that the new plantings will be okay. In most cases, the seeds, just like people, are hardier than we think. We just have to have faith in that seed.

And so it is.