Category Archives: Garden Grace

The Old Oak Tree

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One of my favorite places to be still is here, beneath a very old oak tree in our church prayer garden. Its branches spread out over a trickling stream and bubbling fountain and a small labyrinth. In dry times, like our present drought, there is crusty brown growth along its mighty branches. But when we are blessed with rainfall, this turns to vibrant green. It is Resurrection Fern.

At all times I soak up the green and growing refreshment of this place. But it is in the times when I feel drought in my spirit that I come here to be still and know God, and to refill and refuel – the greening of my heart, Eastering.

Perspectives and Paths

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“To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday”. ~John Burrough

 

vine greens and reaches

early light dawns and dapples

new  morning new mercy

 

Blessing of Light

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They can be like a sun, words.

They can do for the heart

what light can for a field.

-St. John of the Cross, Love Poems from God (trans. Daniel Ladinsky)

This weather worn garden sign is propped on the fence behind my cucumber vines.  When I gathered my small harvest, I thought of these words.  The blessing of light, along with soil and moisture produced something good and nourishing.  The word Peace reminds me that my words have that potential when I use them to bless and encourage.

Sadly, the opposite can also be true.  Words spoken in haste or frustration may damage growth and wither relationship. I can choose to speak light and blessing.  I pray to speak Peace.

I Have This Day

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Celebrate Now 

I have long thought Hibiscus flowers exotic and lovely. They remind me of Bali, where we often visited when we lived in Indonesia.  Outside the little thatched roof lodging at Poppie’s Cottages where we sometimes stayed, large shrubs of the plant were always in bloom.  Once I sat outside on the tiny porch where they left our kopi and mango breakfast and painted one of the flowers.  I remember searching for a scarlet or vermillion paint that would allow me to capture the intensity of its color.  Now I mostly photograph the hibiscus that grow in our garden.  They help me remember to celebrate today – because today is all each flower has.  Whether I enjoy the bloom as it grows with large glossy leaves, or pluck it to bring inside to grace our kitchen table, it only lasts one day.  Putting its stem into water does not prolong the beauty.  By the next morning, this flower’s petals folded shut.  

Awareness

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“Do not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.” ~ James Thurber

fish flashing in lavender shadow

lily lifting  purple wonder

prayers unfurling

hope

Reflection

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Photography by Skye Parker, my granddaughter

These windows at the back of our house mirror a rose arbor covered with blooms just a month ago. But summer arrives today says the calendar as well as the temperature, so the scanty blooms that are still there are pale and dried.  The reflection today seems to say “all gone away.” But I know this rose. It is hardy and tenacious, with a reputation for surviving even a hurricane. I know it will bloom again. I will not mourn for lost blossoms. I will enjoy the many shades of green in its leaves, admire the lacy intertwining of its branches. I will wonder at the raindrops caught in spider webs woven in rose canes.  I will count the bird nests perched inside the arbor’s protection, and rest in the shade it gives me. And I will be grateful for eyes that can see the rose bush reflected in the windows of home.

“Whether one looks at a star, a child, a moment of sorrow, or a time of gladness, blessed is the ordinary…I believe the small moment is the carrier of God’s most endearing gift, and that it must not be permitted to slip away unsavored and unappreciated…If one accepts each day as a gift from the Father’s hand, one may sometimes hear a voice saying, “Open it. I invite you to share with me in these little appointments with myself as we try to unwrap the hidden beauties in an ordinary day.”      Gerhard Frost in Blessed is the Ordinary

Questions and Answers

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We are hearing so many stories of tragedy and trauma, of danger and despair.  Some of the horror is magnified by the immediacy with which we now receive the news.  Social media and news reporting brings word and image straight into our homes and hearts from the real-time scene.  “Breaking news” threatens to break us. For some of us, the pain is present in our immediate and extended families  Is there anything we can reply to disillusionment and despair? To the erosion of hope?  To fear?  What does the intersection of faith and art (which this blog addresses) offer in response to this reality? How is our energy best spent in helping each other?

Howard Thurman offers this:  “The mass attack of disillusionment and despair, distilled out of the collapse of hope, has so invaded our thoughts that what we know to be true and valid seems unreal and ephemeral. There seems to be little energy left for aught but futility. This is the great deception…To drink in the beauty that is within reach, to clothe one’s life with simple deeds of kindness, to keep alive a sensitiveness to the movement of the spirit of God in the quietness of the human heart and in the workings of the human mind – this is as always the ultimate answer to the great deception.”

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roots reaching past drought

pushing up through rocky path

surviving In sun or shadow,

blooming with perennial grace

alive

map 6-14-2013

A Close Look

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One of my gifts for Mothers Day was a bunch of tulips.  They were a delightful surprise when I found them on my front porch. I took them out of their box, trimmed their stems and put them into water, fragile, tight buds, petals held together like small pastel hugs, no clue of their real color. By the next morning, buds began to turn to blooms and the next few days were a wonder of  unfolding deep magenta, peach, orange and apricot plus buttery yellows punctuated with a few creamy white blossoms.  My tulips were lovely and I enjoyed them every day.  But it was only as they truly opened and I came close to marvel at the art inside their cups that I saw all the colors, all the intricate markings of their center.  I admired them from a distance, but they took my breath away when I looked more carefully.

I learn to “look again” and practice wonder.

“The patterns of our lives reveal us.  Our habits measure us.”

011Thank you, Jeremy.