And just like that...
I reconnect with Source
One week ago, I sat in the garden watching my husband work on his latest project—a stone step and walkway. I watched the sun move around the bowl of our clearing, reveled in the unseasonably cool breeze—and just like that, with an almost audible click, I was back in sync with All That Is.
This—the feeling of well-being and interconnectedness that touching the earth, handling plants, making them grow and thrive imparts—is why I garden. Why I’m so passionate about it. Why I proselytize about it. That feeling fled sometime at the end of July as if a switch turned off. And I’ve been struggling. I’ve felt lost. Silent in the face of that silence from Source. And now, completely without ceremony, the connection is back.
Was it the change in weather? I’ve been looking at weather maps with rains in a more or less solid bloc from Birmingham to Mexico City for nearly two weeks now, and the news has been full of images of rushing waters and stranded motorists.
There’s been no rain at all in this little corner of Upstate South Carolina, but we’re happy nonetheless because the rains seem to have broken the back of the heat. The daily highs have been leveling off after hitting the low eighties. Today’s high was 72: a number that translates simply to “heaven” for me.
August in South Carolina, of course, was the “hell” from which I emerged.
Perhaps this sounds like hyperbole. I know our state has competition in the heat department: I’ve seen those crazy highs coming out of the desert West (and even experienced them a time or two). I’ve watched the searing heat waves spreading across the Midwest and those East Coast heat islands racking up truly startling numbers on the evening news this summer.
None of that served to make a single instant of the buggy, weedy misery of baking under the Southern sun any more bearable. So once again this summer, I went to earth and allowed the #BellafloraFarmBoy to carry the load.
Is this a confession? Am I admitting to being a “fair weather gardener”? 100 percent.
My favorite seasons are fall and spring. I don’t even mind winter—the season of putting things to bed, going out into the forest for firewood, and attacking implacable foes like the Japanese honeysuckle and English ivy that the previous owners allowed to run wild. But the bake sale that tortures us every summer from the end of July to the end of August? Those are the hardest four weeks of the gardening year for me.
What a mercy they’re over. What a mercy that it’s almost fall. What a mercy that the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower”… is flowing through me once again. And I can write once more.
As if in celebration, the garden showed me something new last week: the first bloom from a night-blooming cereus I’d grown from cuttings gifted by a dear and departed friend two summers ago.
A sign? I’m taking it as one.
That Cerus needed the “bake sale” of August to flower and we Southerners should treat August as Northerners treat dark, cold January— a time to retreat and slow down. Love the post and patio!