Garden in Full Bloom

Sit, or lie back. You've earned the ground. [pause] Close your eyes. [pause] Three slow breaths, and with each one, let the week land: everything you've named, everything you've written, everything you've laid down. [long pause]

Go back to your garden. [pause] You've been here every day this week, whether you noticed or not. But look at it now. [pause] The weeds you named on Wednesday — someone has been pulling them, and that someone was you. Look at the pile of them at the edge of the ground. [long pause]

Look at the soil. [pause] The rocks you carried — the ones with the names and the dates and the diagnoses written on them — they're out. There are holes where they used to be, and that's all right. A hole where a rock used to be is called room. [long pause]

And the roots. [pause] You went further down this week than most people go in years. You found where the old fear started. You wrote letters you never thought you'd write. [pause] The roots aren't perfect now — that was never the promise. But they're known. And a known root can be fed, and a fed root holds. [long pause]

Now — look at the shoot. [pause] It's not a shoot anymore. [pause] Watch it. Stem thickening. Leaves opening toward the light like hands. [pause] Watch a bud form. Take your time. [pause] Watch it open. [long pause]

This is what your life feels like with what it needs. [pause] Not a different life. Yours — watered, weeded, pruned, and given light. [pause] Stand in your garden and feel what that's like in your body. Where do you feel it? Your chest? Your shoulders? Let it be physical. Joy is biological — your body has been waiting for this signal. [long pause]

— silence —

There's fruit coming. You can see it starting — green and small and certain. You won't pick it this week. Fruit doesn't work that way; fruit is what patience looks like from the outside. But it's coming, and here's the truth you take down the mountain: you don't grow fruit. You tend the soil. The fruit grows on its own. [long pause]

Really rest today — the kind you maybe haven't had in years. The garden grows while the gardener sleeps. That's not a metaphor. That's how it actually works. [long pause]

Come back gently. [pause] Breath. [pause] Fingers. [pause] The real garden around you — birds, air, this ground that has been growing things a great deal longer than any of us. [pause] Open your eyes when you're ready.