Evening in the Garden

If I can’t be on the trail or camping, I’d rather be in my garden. 

I rarely spend time on a trail without pausing to breathe deep of the beauty. The sticky worries I’m trying to pluck out of my head tend to pull loose on the trail. I leave them lying there and walk on.

But to be truthful, I don’t get to hike every day—not even every week. I’m still trying to figure out how to be in all the places and do all the things I want to do in a day, job or no job. 

Being in my gardens is the next best thing to being on a trail. 

Someone once told me that planting a flower garden was a waste of time. “You can’t eat flowers,” they said. I beg to disagree. And no, I’m not talking about edible plants. I’m talking about how they feed my soul. I breathe deeper there, and my spirit quiets, almost as though I’m on the trail.

…Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,

Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Rhodora

Indoors, the things I should be doing constantly loom over me as though the walls and ceiling press them against me. The goals, the word count targets, the unfinished projects, the daily chores. The worries of a mother and grandmother. 

But in my garden, the beauty of flowers and trees and sky swells in my soul, shrinking heavy thoughts into their proper weight and place. If hiking allows me to cast them off for a time, being in my garden reminds me of the vastness of the beauty that awaits each day, and just how small my worries are.  

I kneel in front of my flower bed as the cool breeze ripples across the blossoms, and they nod as though they’re priests offering absolution and peace.

The rays slant gently across the yard, soothing after the burning glare of earlier. And just like that, the day slips from afternoon to evening.

The daisies are mostly done blooming, their leaves faded and tinged with white. I pull the dead brown fronds from the iris that stopped blooming months ago, and trim the seed pods from the bright red and yellow gaillardia to plant next spring. There aren’t many blossoms left, and new buds are harder to find. The leaves on the currant bushes at the edges of the garden are turning orange and crimson.

I scan the mountainsides for the gold that I know is soon to come, but I look away quickly, hoping not to see it. The truth of the changing season is here among the flowers, though I resist the knowledge with every fiber of my being. I’m not ready.

With my hands in the flowers, I sense something new riding the breeze. I look to the mountains, and just like that, autumn slips through the trees to rest beside me in the shade.

The sun rises and sets. Flowers bloom, and fall, and plant their seeds. There is a rhythm to life in a garden, a calm sureness that the earth knows. 

I linger a little longer, listening to the spruce sighing in the evening stillness.  

And peace comes dropping, as the poet said, slow and sweet, in my garden.

I wish you peace today—and some stolen moments in a garden.

I hope you enjoyed sharing mine. Please pass them on.