Tonight after dinner, hubby and I went to our local big box store for mulch, landscape plants and a few flowers. I have many garden areas surrounding our home. My first garden started out fairly small, about sixteen feet by twenty feet. I knew nothing about gardening then. Over the years, the garden grew to at least six times that size but now it’s being downsized to accomodate my limited time to keep it up.
Oh, how I loved getting up and getting out in that garden early in the morning and having my first cup of coffee. I would often have my devotions there.Then I’d plant, transplant and weed for an entire day, getting dirty and loving every minute. I’d come in exhausted just in time to fix dinner. It was never “work” for me.
But over time the neighbor’s pine trees at the south end of the garden have ruined the soil about ten feet out from the fence. The neighbor’s trees to the west now cast too much shade. Last year I moved my broken concrete wall to create a smaller garden. My husband has relaid the brick patio I built years ago.
By the time I’m done, it will be smaller and more intimate with tall grasses creating a kind of secret garden. Only easily grown perennials, shrubs, and grasses will grace this garden. It will have more of a “park” feel. As I write I’m feeling nostalgic for what once was.
But then life, like gardens, changes as the tree of life casts its shadows over us. It’s not that shadows are bad. Sometimes they prompt much-needed change.
What once worked for us doesn’t anymore. What once didn’t work, now does.
The shadows encourage us to re-design our lives, pull in a little, change the boundaries. But what emerges is a life that is better attuned to how we’ve changed over the years. Who we’ve become.
We can embrace change or we fight it. We can see change as a life-giving or life-zapping. One thing is for sure, life will always change. That’s the only predictable aspect of life that is always true.
I’m looking forward to the changes.
God bless and I hope you have a good day.
