Close the gate behind you…
By Archangelica | January 6, 2008
Every new year, like every new day, is a fresh opportunity to begin again. This new year is already sparkling for me like sunlight on water. I am becoming more fully myself. I am looking with more gentleness and forgiveness on a past littered with more trash than the last day of mardi gras. I am dusting off and holding with forgotten fondness and affection all the people, places and things that were treasures and memories and seeds of hope that have grown into flowers, vines and even a few trees in the garden of my heart. I am letting go of vintage pain , grudges and unforgiveness that have kept me stuck to the wounds of my past. This is the year for all those ghosts and lingering spirits to go into the Light.
I am pulling weeds in winter (easy to do in Texas) and planting seeds and bulbs and tasting the strange sweet fruit that has grown and ripened in the dirt of my life. Some things growing here are too new to be named others have flourished from childhood like the marigolds that border the strawberry patch. I planted those with my grandmother as a child. They have survived. I am making room for new growth, some annuals and some perennials, in a determined effort to overcome the grey and the barren with the good and the true. My hands are deep in the earth, the essence of my life, tossing away rocks and stones and breaking up the soil that is cracked and hard where nothing has ever grown. Their is dirt under my nails and sweat in my eyes. Tomorrow my back will hurt. But the fallow days are done and this hard work feels good in my bones as some of my sweat drips into the soil from which new life will come.
I’ve noticed some changes that lead me on. There are more birds now that stop to sing or drink or forage for their breakfast. There are fewer crows and grackles that come to kill, steal and destroy. Mine is a wild garden that wants to be proper and lush and serene. It needs more roses and one day there will be lily-of-the-valley in the shade by Our Lady’s statue of moss gilded stone. I have a vision. Lately too there have been more butterflies and for the first time in many summers I spotted three fireflies on a July night. The wasps nests have been fewer (I hate wasps and stinging things!) and every once in a marvelous while, a ruby throated hummingbird comes for a flower communion.
Still, there are parts of my garden I shouldn’t like for you to see. There are parts I don’t like seeing. There are patches of overgrown ugliness with thistles and stickers and broken glass ground into the dirt. But I have picked up the cigarette butts and this may be the year I start picking out the glass (with gloves on of course). I’ve built a very fine fence around this eyesore and I keep it locked so no one wanders in. The problem with the fence is that I keep out too! This is the year to get in there and root it all up to be tossed in the burning barrel. I don’t think I can do it by myself though. I’m going to have to ask for some help.
There are some parts of my garden that are several square feet of “just lovely”. I come here to think and to pray and to ponder. It seems I am my best self here and it’s a good place for tea parties and picnics and tall glasses of pink lemonade. The other day a bluebird flew in and looked at me with one cocked eye before swishing off in a dazzle of blue. Of all the birds that come here he is my favorite. I’d like for him to stay long enough to sing one day. I think I’ll build a bluebird house and hang it on one of the old fence posts. I’ll have to get a book from the library to learn how to do it. Imagine if he came more often and brought some friends. Imagine if he moved in and had babies and raised a family and there were always bluebirds in the garden. That would be heaven.
The spiritual life is an interior garden. Eden is on the inside.
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One Response to “Close the gate behind you…”
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January 28th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Blessings to you, Brother Christopher and thank you for sharing these moments in your life. Each day is a new day and a new beginning. May God continue to bless you each new waking day with love and light.
Father Tom