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.
Posts Tagged ‘garden’
So Alive
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, grief, holy, loss on August 15, 2025| 22 Comments »
Some of the Stories
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, love, self-compassion, self-loathing, self-love on August 4, 2025| 11 Comments »
It all serves.
—Joi Sharp
Strange, perhaps, this path
to learn to love myself—
throwing back Mad Dog 20/20
in a raucous backyard party.
Letting college boys touch me
just to feel wanted for a night.
The journals I kept to calculate
how many calories in a bowl of All Bran
a banana muffin, a cucumber, a plum.
I don’t know why I had to date
that man who took what I
did not want to give. Why
I became quiet, quieter still.
I don’t know why I told that lie.
Don’t know why I couldn’t contain
my anger that one morning. Don’t know
why I said yes when I meant no.
But I do know I am the sum
of all these stories, and maybe
I had to go through self-loathing
before I could practice self-love.
I know all those choices brought me here
to this garden in late summer
where, despite a lack of rain,
the nasturtiums are thriving
like tiny orange teachers in how to be soft.
There is a love so much greater than I am
that guides me to wrap the arms of my heart
around all the younger versions of myself
as if they are my children, helping me trust
there is nothing they could do
that would make them unlovable,
even when their actions caused pain.
Look, I say to my past, to myself. The roses
I thought were dead are blooming.
Things grow in the most surprising ways.
Soon, there will be sunflowers.
After a Day in the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, green, growing on August 1, 2025| 4 Comments »
If we are made of light,
we are also made of dark.
Like the marigolds I transplanted
today. Their leaves reach toward sun
at the same time all those thin,
thin roots reach down, down
into the earth.
Green, I say to myself.
Green is who I am. Green
is what happens when
light meets dark. Green
is daring to live in two
opposite worlds at once,
it’s knowing full body
how deeply those two worlds
need each other.
I say it not as a fact,
but as a way to wake myself up.
Green. It tastes clean in my mouth.
Like something beautiful.
Someone about to bloom.
Growing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, garden, summer, tending on July 25, 2025| 3 Comments »
for James & Brad
In late July, if you’re lucky, you wander
through the flower gardens your friends
have been nurturing for years—red beds
of bee balm and yellow mounds of St. John’s Wort,
long purple spears of butterfly bush
and thick golden stands of rudbeckia,
and all around you the buzzing, the humming,
the pollinators thrumming, the weaving
of bees and the braiding of birds
and somehow, standing in this thriving place
so lovingly tended and mindfully grown,
you are flooded with admiration for your friends
so great you disappear into the fullness
and emerge with new roots of your own,
one more living thing shaped by the care
and kindness they bring to the world.
Learning to Treasure What’s Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, garden, gratefulness, life, rose on July 23, 2025| 6 Comments »
I believed I had lost it,
the rose bush I planted last year,
what, with the way it died back
after that hard spring frost.
Died all the way to the ground.
Every stem turned brown.
Was it for hope or laziness
I didn’t dig out the roots?
This year, the rose stayed dead
until one day, green. More green.
Then burgeoning, vibrant green.
And now flowers, so many flowers,
flowers of palest pink. The scent
greets me at the garden gate
every time I enter. How precious
it has become to me, this treasure.
Not because I thought it had died,
but because now I remember
it will.
The Choosing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, parts of self, self-acceptance, younger self on July 16, 2025| 4 Comments »
Sometimes, when picking flowers
from the garden, I choose not
the showiest blooms, but the snapdragon
with the crooked stem or the pink cosmos
with the slenderest petals or the delphinium
stalk with the fewest blue flowers. Aren’t you lovely,
I say to them as I snip at their stems
and arrange them in a vase, placing them
in the center of my home. In these moments
I am aware of the gangly child I was, crooked-
stemmed and awkward, who longed to be chosen.
I like the way the room feels different
because the flowers are there. I like the way
they change me, too, as if I am saying
to that gawky part of me who felt unlovable,
I choose you. I choose you. I choose you.
In a Time of Many Wildfires
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flower, garden, paradox, wildfire on July 11, 2025| 2 Comments »
Geranium leaves
covered in fine white ash—
how many ghosts of tall pine trees
visit today in my garden—
and still, with such delicacy
the new flowers open.
Just When I Ache with How Much Humans Can Hate
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bloom, dark, flower, garden, primrose, service on June 28, 2025| 8 Comments »
Nina takes me by the hand
and runs with me through the garden,
earthen angel in a pale green skirt,
her long silver hair flies behind her,
and I laugh as she tugs me
past snap peas, arugula, broccoli,
and red lettuce leaves. We duck
beneath the rose-covered bower and
emerge into the open lawn, pass deep,
deep purple clematis, to enter another
garden where the evening primrose
flowers that bloom for only one night
are blooming, eight bright
yellow blooms! For each of them,
this is the night. It’s so fleeting,
this beauty. So fleeting, this life.
Long after I leave the garden, I think
of Nina tending these primroses—
so much work for such brief joy.
Or is the secret to know the work
itself is the lasting spark—putting
ourselves in service to something
that blooms in the dark.
Let the World Have Its Way With You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blooming, brokenness, daisy, flower, garden, opening, rain on June 9, 2025| 12 Comments »
Today it’s the daisy that teaches me
about opening. How lovely it was last week.
I praised its yellow, sun-gold petals
reaching out as they were from the bright center.
After last night’s fierce rain, the flower has been trashed,
stripped of its petals. Every. One. Bent and bruised,
they lie splayed in the dirt. And the daisy
goes on with its growing. New leaves.
New roots. New buds. Nourished
by the rain that tore the flower apart.
How often have I, too, lost all my petals, only to learn
that was not the end of the story of opening?
This world is a world of both beauty and loss.
Did I ever really believe one opening
would last me forever? It’s always a lifetime
of learning. Today it’s so clear that when
I can bring presence to loss or resistance,
this act makes pain itself luminous,
is how the heart grows roots, and buds and leaves.
Always it returns to this—offering the broken world
my wonder. In return, oh, the opening.
Annual
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged annual, flower, garden, gratefulness, mortality on May 31, 2025| 8 Comments »
I know they will die,
the dahlias, the zinnias,
the petunias, the geraniums,
will die come autumn,
and still I buy them, still
plant them and sing to them
as I do. Looking up
from the garden beds, trowel
in hand, I see it in everything—
the spruce, the ants, the swallows,
this hand—all that lives will die.
And staring at the basil, pungent
and green and ephemeral, I feel
so darn lucky to unfold
for whatever time I am given.
To bloom while I can. To be marigold.
Calendula. Mother. Begonia. Gratefulness
floods me like low summer sun.
I turn my face toward that light.