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Gardening is not for everybody. Or rather, not everybody gardens. Different reasons: no interest, allergies, sore back, no opportunity; but those who are able are very fortunate, for gardening has many blessings.

To watch things grow, to see a plant expand and open up into a stalk or leaf or petal is exciting and gratifying . . . and inexplicable.  Growth takes time. You don’t see movement, but something changes, you see the new and are very pleased even as you wait for more. The lilly opens. The rose buds. In good order bloom pillars of color, cascades of beauty. In time the season closes down, maybe just for one flower, maybe for the garden, and the gardener waits amid his catalogs and tools for the next season. It has been worthwhile, but there is more to gardening than gardening. 

We are gardeners, and we are the flowers in the gardens of life. As do flowers:

    We begin in darkness.

         We quicken.

              We stir.

                   We sprout.

                      We grow.

                         We bloom.

                            We flourish.

                                We wilt.

                                    We die.

Some think we are annuals that, after we change into that final darkness, become that darkness and the cycle goes on.  Other flowers begin to live in us as we did before. Others think we are perennials that in that darkness begin again to quicken and stir and in inconceivable ways grow into gardens that we can imagine only in poetry and fantasy or, as some say, in revelations. Gardens are mysteries and our life is a garden