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.
Posts Tagged ‘garden’
Growing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, garden, summer, tending on July 25, 2025| 3 Comments »
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.
It’s the Forgettable Moments I Miss
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cars, conversation, garden, grief, ordinary on October 22, 2024| 10 Comments »
I want to be in the garden
with you again,
hands in the dirt,
maybe listening
to cottonwood leaves
spreading rumors
of fall, but maybe
not even listening.
I want a moment
so mundane, just
pulling bindweed,
nodding and humming absently
as you talk about race cars,
a moment so unmemorable
I forget how damn precious
every single moment is;
I want a moment I take
for granted, want to
be bored or even fussy
standing beside you,
the beets too small
to harvest, your voice
rambling on about pole positions
and pit stop strategies,
and me utterly clueless
I would ever look back
and long to hear you
wax on about balancing fuel loads,
worn tires, soft compounds,
anything, anything at all.
In the Garden in October
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, gratefulness, snap pea, tenderness on October 14, 2024| 8 Comments »
Though the vines are almost all brittle and dried,
somehow I find four perfect sugar snap peas
at the top of the fence. Not tough. Not pale
with age, but sweet and crisp and stringless,
and I pull them into my mouth with delight
as if I am eating the word yes. Aren’t they amazing?
I say, holding the last snap pea up to the sunflowers
where they hang heavy and dead on their stalks.
I want to offer this pea to the world like a small proof
of pleasure—some evidence that life persists
despite cold, despite exhaustion,
though the light itself seems to be failing,
but here, look in my hand, this testament to tenderness
so full of spring, so unfathomable, so here.
On This Day Twenty Years After You Were Born
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birth, garden, grief, language, silence on September 12, 2024| 15 Comments »
I dug in the garden. For hours.
Hands deep in the dirt
where once your hands
dug, too. Pulled carrots.
Potatoes. Onions.
Held them up to the air
and marveled at what grows
in the dark. Asked you questions.
As always, you didn’t answer.
Or perhaps it’s truer to say
I do not know how
to interpret the language
of rain, the message
of the white seed that landed
in my hand, the significance
of the hummingbird moth
drinking from bright red nasturtiums.
But I am learning the language of silence.
Same language the earth speaks.
Same language we spoke while you
were still forming inside me. Such
an intimate tongue. Such generous
conversation. All day I practice
speaking it with you. All day
I practice listening.
What the Gardener Knows
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cantaloupe, garden, love, melon, opening on September 5, 2024| 7 Comments »
When I say I love you wholehearted,
I mean the whole cantaloupe, sweetheart.
I mean the strange webby skin and
the sweet, firm flesh and the absolutely
freaking messy center. I mean the way
we have to wait so patiently until it’s ripe.
The way I can smell it across the room.
The way it bruises so easily.
I mean I am speaking of love. I mean
I am well aware there’s no word in the world
as delicious as the sticky juice as it dribbles down
the chin. I mean I understand the potential disaster
in underestimating the need for warmth,
how quickly a frost can end it all.
I mean this is no kohlrabi love, sweetheart,
but I don’t know if you’re the melon
or I’m the melon or we both are, I just know
there’s no way to know what we’ve got
until we both split open and break so
completely there’s no knowing which
goop is mine and which is yours
and this is the way we survive—
not by staying whole, but by opening
wide and giving it all away.
Paradise
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, paradise, paradox, pleasure on August 21, 2024| 9 Comments »
after “Pleasure” by Rick Barot
It was a garden, they said,
with an apple tree and one
man and one woman,
always blissful.
And while I don’t doubt
this, too, is paradise,
I know well the paradise
when one woman is alone
in the garden pulling up
bindweed by the roots,
knowing she’ll never get it all.
And somehow there is pleasure
in the endless pulling.
I know the paradise
when fifty-thousand people
sing together a song
about heartbreak.
And the paradise of a lover’s
arms when I’m weeping
is somehow even more paradisical
than when the world feels easy.
I’m not saying I want
things to go wrong.
I, too, pray for peace.
But I know now that pain
does not preclude paradise.
The bruised apple
makes a sweet sauce.
The arm that aches
still holds the beloved child.
And after a fire,
the world grows back
with such startling green.
Looking at the Bouquet on My Counter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, flower, garden on August 19, 2024| 4 Comments »
Like tiny, earthbound fireworks
that flourish in my garden,
the flowers of wild bergamot
flare purple, their slender petals
curl back, and I am reminded
how small it can be, our chance
to blaze, to be beautiful, to spread
our sweet perfume, and still make—
at least in one life—a real difference.
Allium sativum
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, garlic, growth, heart on August 8, 2024| 8 Comments »
Not unlike the garlic
bulbs pulled today
from garden soil,
the heart, too,
is lumpy, misshapen,
filled with strong
and good intentions.
Never quite what
I dream—but hey,
it’s not nothing
to grow where
there is no light.
It’s not nothing
to grow at all.
Poem Not Really About Spinach
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cooking, garden, second chance, spinach, summer, time, too late, waiting on August 1, 2024| 2 Comments »
Already bolted and wilting
in the heat, the spinach
is past prime and yet
on this first day of August
I’m able to pull two pounds
of triangular leaves
into my bowl, enough
for a generous pan
of creamy saag paneer.
Sometimes it’s not
too late. Sometimes
the world waits for us.
Sure, the stakes are low tonight,
but sometimes we get a glimpse
that things we thought
were lost are not lost
at all, not yet—just taste
that bright and earthy
green, so full of comfort,
so humble, so good.
Let Us Gather in the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, community, food, garden, gathering on July 25, 2024| 6 Comments »
Let us gather in the garden in late July
when the snap peas are fat and sweet on the vines
and the tiny white cilantro flowers charge
the air with fragrant green. When the sunflowers
have not yet opened, but the cosmos are already
a riot of pinks and white and the nasturtiums
have erupted into spicy orange petals
and the heads of lettuce open and open
as if looking for the edges of the universe.
Let us gather when the onions are beginning
to swell and the kale leaves are big as elephant ears
and the basil is lush and vigorous and flourishing
and it’s so good to be here with our hunger,
not to consume but to be opened by goodness,
to know ourselves as part of this generous
plentiful land. It so good to be here
together amongst the ripening,
to share the living blessing, to welcome
each other into the garden of our hearts,
to nourish the seeds of all that is to come
forming even now inside our open hands.
Now That the Stakes Are Low
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bunny, garden, letting go, rabbit, release on July 10, 2024| 11 Comments »
For the fourth time in four weeks,
I slip my spade into the dark soil
of the half-circle garden.
I make twenty shallow holes,
then lift the pansies from crinkly
plastic containers and drop
the root-bound squares into the earth.
Within hours, the small brown bunny
arrives with his pink twitchy nose
and his small round lump
of soft bunny body,
and while I wash dishes
I meet through the window
his innocent, unblinking gaze
as he consumes a dozen
deep purple petals
in small, efficient tugs.
He looks at me as if to say,
You love me. And I do.
I croon at the bunny how
cute his small ears. How perfect
his bliss. How good he is
for eating his pretty bunny food.
Tomorrow, the rest
of the blooms will be gone.
In a week, the leaves will
be gone, too. Every. Single. One.
And I will go buy more pansies.
How sweet it’s become,
this path of surrender,
the strange joy that rises in me
when I see my precious pansies
nibbled to the roots.
Now that the stakes are low,
it’s much easier to bow
to the way things are.
For the price of pansies,
I can practice again and again
how to find true delight
in this art of letting go.
Practice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, bindweed, garden, hands, practice, touch, weeding on June 20, 2024| 2 Comments »
I plunge my hands into the soil
and tug on the long white bindweed roots
that cling to the cool damp dark.
Never once have I pulled the whole plant.
Always, the bindweed comes back.
Once I might have longed for a weed-free
world. How did I not see the bindweed
for what it is—a chance to touch
again and again what humbles me, and
to learn with my hands the art of acceptance
so my hands might teach my heart.
The Teacher
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, Joi Sharp, learning, student, teacher on February 21, 2024| 6 Comments »
for Joi Sharp
In the garden of wisdom,
she did not step in as head gardener.
Instead, she tended her own planting.
She showed me how to weed
the stories we tell ourselves,
how inner spaciousness
is the richest soil for growth.
She did not do the tilling for me.
Inquiry became my hoe.
She offered questions free
as rain water.
And when it was time to sow,
from her own rows she gathered seeds.
She did not do the planting.
She handed the seeds to me.
Autumn in the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, garden, persistence, snapdragon on October 12, 2023| 6 Comments »
Though the garden wears mostly brown leaves
and dried vines, though the stems
of the sunflowers are brittle and broken and bent,
though frost has taken nearly every living thing,
the snapdragons still bloom, scarlet flags of persistence,
their heads deep red, their petals still soft,
and I know it won’t last forever,
but for now, they resist what is cold, what is dark,
and I, while I can, I want to be snapdragon,
want to bring to this life all the beauty I can muster,
even when it’s dire, and give it all away.