Green thumb

First days of spring were finally here after a long winter both literally and metaphorically speaking…and this particular morning was brutal.

Depression can trigger unbeckoned. Like a tsunami, it rips through the sunlight without warning turning the tide on the hope that the day had started with.

Sometimes amidst the onslaught, I fall. I forget who I am. Daughter of so many I often confuse the facts with the truth.

Adoption, divorce, remarriage. The facts are a glorious mess that I lose myself in.

The truth – I’ve got to look higher.

Its a bad habit of mine to people please and find my worth in the opinion of those I share my life with. It’s never consistent.

I took my angst out on the springtime garden. First carefully and hesitantly, I am not a green thumb. Then once I got going it was all in. No kidding, the chainsaw even made an appearance!

As I trimmed, lopped back, weeded and shaped, a whisper spoke softly …

This is where you are …this is a season of pruning back the overgrowth, the excess, the unnecessary, all that doesn’t fit with the plan. It looks and feels brutal but it is necessary for the light to reach the secret places. It’s hard now but springs here and summers coming.Seasons always change.

And just like that, I realized, if I want the bounty of a productive garden I need to do the work and cut back hard. As I pruned and trimmed, the light got in revealing weeds that had been hidden away strangling the potential growth out of this space. I realized that it needed dealing with if I wanted this garden bed to breathe life again.

I have found that it’s almost always in the season of hard work that I find my fit, my strength. It’s in the clearing out of the old that what’s of value becomes known. That I remember my worth. Fresh light shines on new possibilities and new dreams are conceived. This is the reward for braving the overgrowth and doing the work.

I am slowly getting better at this. Practise makes perfect or so they say. My thumbs are a little greener these days too and seasons change, thank God they do.