I’d love to have a garden. A small patch of earth glorying with heirloom tomatoes, green beans, butter lettuce, cucumbers, broccoli & cauliflower, maybe some beets that in my spare time I’d learn to pickle and in the same process dye my hands a beautiful hue of purple. Oh and there’s flowers too. Ranunculus and Sunflowers and Snap Dragons and Irises and Daffodils. I’d love to have all these and more. To have a cactus garden with succulents and prickly little cacti that bloom with resplendent flowers.
I’d love to have earth in my back yard that would allow such things to grow instead of clay and desperately dry earth because HELLO I live in Phoenix where rain is so rare it’s a magical thing. I’d love to be able to keep plants alive…because Lord knows I can’t even keep cactus and succulents alive.
There’s been a theme of garden since I came back from Moldova. The Art Journaler is focusing on secret gardens this month. My anthem from coming back from Moldova has been Beautiful Things by Gungor. I’ve listened to very little music since I got back from Moldova. My heart and soul have longed for silence and I’ve given them that gift. Yet, when they need to hear melodies they long for this song and this song alone.
Perhaps it’s the blooming of life after living as if I were dead for so long. Perhaps it’s the revelation of hope and of flight, but these lyrics that speak of life out of dust is what my inner being is meditating on.
“All this pain
I wonder if I’ll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change at all
All this earth
Could all that is lost ever be found
Could a garden come up from this ground at all”
Maybe it’s that I need to see the beautiful things of my life because they are sometimes hard to see. Maybe it’s allowing myself to believe that a garden truly could bloom in this desert.
“All around
Hope is springing up from this old ground
Out of chaos life is being found in You”
Even though I’m starting to hope & trust again, and slowly building my wings, it’s difficult at times. It isn’t that I doubt God’s faithfulness and goodness because I see it in the lives of others. It’s believing that He is faithful & good in my life.
When I was in a kid I entered the science fair at our school. My experiment was planting seeds to see how they grew under different environments. The only one that survived was one that was in a dark closet with a pair of nylons over the Tupperware container. (See even back then I couldn’t keep plants alive….I may worry for our children.) Sometimes it is out of the darkness of our lives that we see growth. We are stretched and seeds are planted, and in the darkness the beauty begins to take root and a garden is created.
– lyrics by Gungor, Beautiful Things
