A rainy morning in the garden..and some learnings.
When you live in an arid place where summers are always dry and brown, rain is like a gift from the gods. It makes you leap out of bed in the mornings, and your whole day could be designed around it. Today was one such beautiful morning. I headed into the garden to breathe in that earthy smell and to feel the cleansing of these drops from heaven.
As I was picking beans for lunch from my bean teepee, a few thoughts came to me:
When you share your gifts with the world, you will prosper and thrive. If you don’t, you will be destroyed.
A strong statement there, eh? But look at the beans - anyone familiar with growing them knows that beans must be harvested every single day when they are ripe, else the plant will go to seed and die. But if you are diligent about picking beans daily, how vigorously they will grow and thrive! A bean plant must share its gifts, the beans, with the world to keep it growing and alive. So must we. We each have a gift (or two or more!) that we are meant to share with the world. It’s only then that we will prosper and shine and grow into our highest selves. If we don’t, we will shrivel up from the inside and die. But what if you aren’t ready? What if you think your gifts aren’t prepared?
Most veggies taste best when they are picked before they reach maturity.
I grow a lot of food in my garden and have often noticed how tender, delicate, and delicious the veggies taste when I pick them before their full maturity. If I get greedy and wait for them to grow bigger, they lose their tenderness and develop a woody taste. Very often, we humans hesitate to share our gifts and talents with the world - we may not feel ready, we may think we haven’t honed our gifts to perfection. But, maybe, when our gifts aren’t completely polished, when they still have some rawness, some vulnerability, that they are most beautiful, most authentic? So don’t wait, friends - share your gifts as they are. At every stage, they will have something lovely to offer.
What you may see as old, ugly, and fallow may be someone’s favorite perch.
We are growing many sunflowers in our garden; this year, they have all grown big, beautiful, and strong. But just as with the cycle of life, as new flowers blossom, the older ones wither and die out. We like keeping our garden natural and wild, so we aren’t big on pruning out dead branches or flowers. There was one sunflower plant near the bean teepee that had some new blossoms and some dead ones. There was one dead stem that had bent over, and on it sat a precious hummingbird. After drinking from many scarlet runner bean flowers, it had chosen this dead, bent-over stem to perch on. From there, it watched the world around it. I wondered then, what if we had pruned out these old stems? What great perches would be lost? When I shared this observation with my family, my 7-year-old commented on another use of the dried sunflowers. He said it was those flowers that dropped their seeds and caused more beautiful sunflowers to grow. Wow. Aren’t these old, dry branches, flowers, and stems much like the elders in our lives? They have so much to give - so much knowledge, so much wisdom, so many wonderful stories to share that someday, these stories, this wisdom could be the very perch we need someday. And when the elders in our families interact with the youngest ones, they can be planting seeds that will help them grow into strong, beautiful beings full of wisdom. So let’s honor them, value them, and keep them in our lives instead of pruning them out of it.
