They’re doomed, of course,
these calendula seedlings
sprouting all across the garden.
Because it’s November.
Because even though
the fall was rainy enough
for water-swollen embryos
to crack open their seed coats,
even though there was time enough
for the primary roots to push down
and the embryonic stems to push up,
even though there was light enough
for the shoots to break through the soil,
for the first true leaves to open
and do their good green work
of turning sunlight into food,
still, the truth is they will freeze.
The truth is they will not have time
to bud and flower and go to seed.
As I stand above the dozens of seedlings,
shaking my head, I swear I hear them say,
No, honey, you are the one who is doomed
if you think the measure of a life
depends on how much one blooms,
doomed if you don’t believe that this, too,
is what we are here to do:
to break through the tight dry shell
that has kept you safe
and rise through the darkness into light.
Posts Tagged ‘garden’
Shift
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, calendula, enoughness, garden, perspective, seedling, seeds on November 9, 2026| 1 Comment »
Sometimes When We Read a Poem Together
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, community, connection, garden, perfume, poetry, reading on October 24, 2026| 3 Comments »
I feel how the poem moves through us, less like a needle and thread that pierces and binds us, though that, too, but it’s more that the poem moves through us the way a wind swirls through a garden and carries the scent of each flower, charging the air with a perfume created by the whole, an ephemeral, alchemical sweetness that honors the essence of everyone there, how they bring to the moment the full spectrum of their own unique experience, and knowing it will never ever again be like this, I trust, too, that it will always and forever be like this, trust we will gather and listen and feel and become that ineffable, inevitable fragrance, will become the honest scent of shared aliveness, trust that in every moment, every single bloom in the garden matters. |
In the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ache, fear, garden, peace on September 2, 2026| 9 Comments »
In the garden works a woman,
in the woman grows a fear,
in the fear lives a truth,
in the truth is an ache.
After some time
of pulling weeds and
deadheading flowers
and before the rain begins,
the ache has sloughed
enough layers to make
it more easily seen.
On its own, the ache
is not so large. When
the woman meets it
between the sunflowers
and snapdragons,
the ache does not disappear,
but somehow it no longer
consumes her, it simply
is as she tugs
at taproots, removes
yellowed leaves.
The world is so much
more alive than the fear
would have her believe.
As day goes down, she
tends the soil, she speaks
to potatoes, to basil,
to kale. There is no seed
for peace, yet it grows here,
the peace of green leaves
and dark earth, the peace of
nightcrawlers, moss and bees.
She speaks to the plants
as she moves through the
rows, and knows ease.
*Inspired by Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”
One in the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, dahlia, garden on August 18, 2026| 4 Comments »
so soon the pink dahlia petals
begin to shrivel and dry,
and look at these hands
that cut away what is dead,
they, too, are dahlia
One Reflection
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, garden, mirror, reflection, sunflower on July 30, 2026| 2 Comments »
standing in the garden
I gaze into the first sunflower—
mirror with a golden frame
While Transplanting Calendula
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fragility, garden, love, marriage on June 2, 2026| 2 Comments »
How gently I move the volunteer sprouts
out of the potato bed and into another row,
careful to gather the fragile roots with a bit
of damp dirt, tamping lightly around the slender stem.
How fragile it all can be. I think of how tenderly
this morning my husband touched my face,
as if too well aware of how a single moment
can change everything. We folded
into each other then like two petals
of a single flower. In the garden,
I stare at the spindly transplants,
a new row of tiny, rounded green leaves.
A delicate ache rises in me, charged with
love for the spare beauty of what is here
and an awareness of how the simplest scrape
can make a whole world disappear.
What Goes On
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bindweed, daughter, garden, mother on May 25, 2026| 5 Comments »
Knowing it will grow back tomorrow
does not stop me from pulling
the bindweed today. Once I pulled
bindweed as if the goal was to clear it
from the garden. Now, I pull bindweed
as if the goal is to love this act of being
alive, this ritual of pulling bindweed, my
daughter beside me, soft easy chatter
rising between us. There is no blessing
or disaster yet that has ended this
communion of tugging on the long white
roots. Somehow, in this season of
endings, the bindweed seems to promise
tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
Over Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communication, connection, flower, garden, growth, lily on May 18, 2026| 2 Comments »
The way my grandmother tended
to her daylilies, that is the way
I want to attune to your words—
knowing how each utterance blooms
only briefly, but when cared for,
the plant itself is hardy, long lasting,
abundant, able to survive both
heat and chill, both loam and clay.
Come love, whisper to me.
I cherish every petal. And when
there is no bloom, I have learned
water and fertilize anyway, to honor
the place where the bloom will be.
Listening to Glen Velez in a Garden in Ohio
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged concrete poem, garden, glen velez, gong, music, silence on May 7, 2026| 5 Comments »
At the Center of the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apple, garden, grief, growth, orchard, tree, wound on May 2, 2026| Leave a Comment »
When no one
is looking
she touches
the wound
that hides
beneath
her smile
where the scion
of acceptance
was grafted
to her rootstock
of stubbornness.
Most people
don’t notice
the scar,
focused as they are
on the fruit,
but she
remembers
the cut,
the tissue exposed.
How tenderly
she traces
that place
where the union
was formed.
Since the wounding,
her fruits
have become
vibrant, complex,
so sharp, even tart,
and so sweet.
The Arrangement
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bouquet, garden, grandmother, sound on March 30, 2026| 8 Comments »
Because touch is one way we offer praise,
this morning I touch my ears
to the see-sawing song of birds
in the tree beside me. I still myself
to focus on their song, and they stop
singing, as if to tease. I touch my ears
to the silence where the song is not.
Touch the warm tones of wind chimes
stirred by a breeze I barely feel.
Touch the hum of the cars
and the growl of a motorcycle I’d rather
shut out. I think of how my grandmother
used grass, even weeds in her flower arrangements.
She taught me you could make anything beautiful.
I try to stop slandering the traffic noise
and gather it into an audible bouquet complete
with birds, chimes, silence, my breath.
How to make the unwelcome welcome?
How to hold tension in ways that compliment?
All morning, all day, I practice opening
to what isn’t easy to love. I make a vase
of the moment. Add all the sound that’s here.
So much I’d rather not to listen to.
I think of my grandmother. I try to find
new ways to hear.
In Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged failure, garden, parsley, patience, seeds, trust on March 28, 2026| 6 Comments »
In soil not yet worked this spring,
two perfect rows of parsley emerge
in a curly leafed celebration of green,
vestiges from last year’s planting.
Where is not garden?
Good hands, what will you do
with this new trust rising
out of what looked like failure?
One Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, garden, interconnectedness on February 28, 2026| 4 Comments »
I am no longer surprised
when strange, exotic
blooms appear in my mind,
knowing now how seeds
arrive on the wind from everywhere.
Now, I am less likely to label
something weed simply because
I didn’t plant it myself.
At the same time, I want
to be discerning, knowing
whatever I choose to grow might
appear soon in the soil of you,
so I am cautious when sowing
bulbs of anger, saplings of judgment,
thorns of certainty.
I want us all to plant great beds
of unanswerable questions
and tend the mystery together.
How else might it change
what these hands do when I
trust every choice matters?
Snapdragons in Autumn
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, autumn, bloom, garden, snapdragon on November 3, 2025| 4 Comments »
They no longer bloom,
but the snapdragons bring
an extravagance of dark green
to the garden otherwise bare.
I almost missed this pleasure,
poised as I was to rip them
from the soil when frost took
all the flowers. But there
is something past bloom
in me that thrills now
to see them there, growing
for the sake of growing,
tall and fully leafed out. Grow
while you can, they seem to say.
Until it’s all over, don’t you
ever stop with your growing.
Eyesight
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bees, flowers, garden, grief, mother, sight, vision on October 21, 2025| 9 Comments »
I’ve never seen the world the bee sees,
a world of iridescence in which petals
change color depending on the angle,
a world in which a field of sunflowers appear
not as a smear of yellow but as individual
blooms. I’ve never seen the bullseye
pattern in the primrose or the pansy,
these human eyes unable to perceive
designs in UV light. Today I look out
at the empty garden where just last week
there were marigolds and calendula,
and I see the absence of flowers, but also,
I see mounds of golds, yellows, oranges, and
I see the boy who used to sit on the edge
of the wooden beds and I see the young
version of me, not yet gray, weeding
the rows, while the boy tells me stories
about school and the things he longs
for beyond what he has. They’re there,
I know, the flowers, the woman,
the boy, though somehow they’re so far
beyond the spectrum not even
the bees can see them.
The Change
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, beauty, change, death, flowers, frost, garden on October 5, 2025| 14 Comments »
Overnight, the frost
took every pink zinnia
every creamy dahlia,
fading their colors to brown.
The nasturtiums have slumped
into dense wilted tangle.
The marigolds hold themselves tall
in a blackened and upright
surrender. For now,
the bright, fresh bouquets
I made yesterday are still
bright and fresh in their vases.
This beauty, we know, won’t stay.
The message is simple:
All that rises passes away.
I see it in these hands
that planted and watered
and weeded and picked—
my skin now wrinkled and thin
as frost-withered petals.
Here: the chance to witness
my own rising and passing.
How natural to age, to die.
The flowers in the vase will wilt.
With every day, so do I.
Such strange gift. First
the joy of putting the self
in service to making something
beautiful. Then, beyond joy,
the grace in learning to let it all go.
Right Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, meditation, quietude on September 25, 2025| 7 Comments »
These autumn afternoons
I find myself in the garden
standing amongst the flowers.
Not deadheading. Not weeding.
Not harvesting. Not scanning
for aphids. Just standing there
a few moments, hands hanging
empty at my sides. It lasts only
a minute or two before I return
to work with a clarity, an attunement,
that felt impossible before.
I want to plant an inner garden.
One I visit without a step.
One that asks nothing of me
except that I find myself there.
A Scrap in Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, dahlia, flower, garden, time on September 6, 2025| 5 Comments »
Something about the relentless beauty
of the dahlias this year makes me forget
lists and calls and news and aches as
I stand beside them in a splendor stupor,
watching them bloom in real time, not
wanting to miss a moment of the long stems
rising, the red color deepening then fading
from the petals as they age. I imagine a time lapse
begins, and the world’s winter white, then greening
again, and now a hundred years pass,
now five hundred, a thousand, and the garden
bed is gone and the fence is gone and
the trees and the ditch and the home
are gone, and there’s no way to know
this was once a place where dahlias grew.
Is it any wonder, then, I call to you, ask you
to come stand here with me to watch
the dahlias open themselves to the sun,
each petal a hymn to the present,
a history soon to be forgotten, a shimmer in time
we might put in a vase and marvel as
all around it the whole world spins.
Case Study in Insanity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, growing, insanity, persistance, planting, trying, zinnias on August 30, 2025| 4 Comments »
Every year, the zinnias have died,
or else have come so close to dying
I’ve dug out their bare, stunted stems
and frost-browned leaves and planted
trusty petunias. But this year. This year
an enchantment of zinnias. A profusion
of red. Magenta. Yellow. Orange. White.
An astonishment of beauty. A bright
constellation of earthbound joy.
You have heard this, too: insanity
is doing the same thing again expecting
different results. So let me be insane.
For this is the year when again
I bought zinnia starts and hoped
for abundance and was stunned
by flamboyant abundance. It’s making
me wonder what else I might sow
until I no longer have energy to plant:
Kindness. Forgiveness. Trust. Love.
Just because they haven’t always flourished
before, well, look at all these zinnias
outside my door, brilliant and burgeoning,
dozens and dozens, and sure, they will die
come winter, but for now, more flowers arrive
every day. Brilliant. Just look at all those petals.
So Alive
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, grief, holy, loss on August 15, 2025| 22 Comments »
Finn, the larkspur are nearly done blooming now,
the tall stalks are scruffy with seed pods where
the dark blue petals used to be.
Is it strange to give you the garden report?
Today is four years since you chose to leave
this world of bindweed and deep red dahlia,
this world of millipedes and green beans
dangling on their vines. The sky is thick
with smoke from a wildfire not so far away.
It was a relief when it began to rain
while I was picking snapdragons and
sunflowers, zinnias and lavender.
I didn’t mind getting drenched
while I filled five vases with flowers,
four vases for our home and one
your father and I took to your grave.
I felt so alive in the middle of the storm,
arranging the blooms in vases just so
while the water dripped from my hair, my nose.
Felt so alive as I smelled the air and spoke
to you and the flowers and sky.
Today my friend Wini told me one way
to keep life sacred is to ask the holy to come.
Please, I said as I stood in the rows.
Please, come. Is it possible the asking itself
is the bridge from the everyday to the holy?
Because I felt it. There in the rain
with my grief-bent heart. There beside
the calendula, aphids and all. Hair plastered
to my head. Tears on my face. Memory
of you writing I love you in the carrot bed.
Me making bouquets for a difficult day.
Even when it hurts, the holy.