The Garden Is Saying

"The garden communicates what it shows to you but you also contribute to the garden some of what you are seeking in terms of your own life, your own state of being.  One reason a garden can speak to you is that it is both its own reality and a manifestation of the interior life of the mind that imagined it in the beginning."  -- Stanley Kunitz

Raised beds:  A desire for defined potential and the full use of all available space to thrive, get closer to other living things, dissolve boundaries and rows so that all can touch.  A dance of cool and warm crops as the human hand wishes to respond rather than enforce something fighting too fiercely with its own environment, wanting to control it rather than nurture (in order to know it on its own terms) and sustain it.

Flowers and Carrots:  Bulldozing woman of purpose, will you not sit still long enough to hear what the flower whispers to the bee, what the carrot confesses to the zinnia?  Beauty has a purpose, too.  You won't waste time noticing it, stubborn list-maker.

Vertical or Growing Up:  The sudden bursting out and up of a thing held too long to the ground, pinned like a wrestler, allowed to tilt greenfacedleaf fully to the sun, tall and made to be taller.  And if I learn to not slouch, ashamed and sky-shy, perhaps I too could be fruitful, could take the full breath of lifting lungs and negotiate the space each one of us was given to move and not to cower.