Back to the Garden

What a true phenomenon a garden is. The more time I spend in my garden, the more I realize how important it is to me in my waning days in my little cocoon here. A garden has so much of what nurtures us -- throughout out lives, but especially at the very beginning, and again, of course, at the very end. A garden is a place of such tranquility, of peace, of harmony, of color, and of gentle motion, which can change very quickly into violent motion, but it’s always moving. It’s truly alive, breathing, growing. It’s a place that attracts life. When I think about what this little piece of land was like when I bought my place -- just barren rock, ground-up gravel 4 inches deep, so that nothing could grow out of it. There was a row of oleanders that were parched and hedged and brittle and looked like store-bought artificial plants. Now I look around and I’m just overwhelmed with the change in just a couple of years. Thanks to my gardener, there is such a variety of colors and textures and fragrances, and collectively they draw bees and butterflies and hummingbirds, and the minute that I put up some bird feeders, they all flock, because there are water fountains and food and shelter, and such a sense of peace and tranquility. This is extremely attractive to us during those times of our lives when that is what we require, just peace and quiet, which I know to many sounds like death, but to those of us who are truly alive, in the spirit, even as our bodies decay and fall apart around us, we are the ones who are truly alive, I think, truly aware with senses that are now not only mature, but also know how to put all this data together in ways that make sense, because five or six or seven or eight decades of living fills in a lot of pieces of the puzzle. The longer you’re here, the more you think that you see more and more clearly what’s going on and how it really all works. It just goes to show that all the time we’re here we’re basically children, ever learning, and ever thinking that we’ve finally arrived at the last great piece of learning. But what a nice classroom it is today to learn in, and how thankful I am that if I have to still be here, these are moments that reassure me of the glory that is to come and the fact that I can hang on if I have to, because that great higher power somehow always manages to give the grace to get through it all. And a beautiful garden is part of that grace.