Thriving...

The Universe has a really beautiful way of letting you know you are exactly where you are supposed to be & doing it well. For this, I am grateful....

I have this little garden that sits at the back of my property. It is surrounded by a rotting, rickety old fence from the previous home owner. I bought this little place mid-summer so it was too late to get a garden started. I loved the idea of a garden but honestly I was glad to have an excuse to not put one in. You see, a very old story was stuck in my head. I was married for 20 years & sometime early in my marriage I asked my husband to help me put in a garden. He hated the idea & had a lot of reasons why. The one that I remember the clearest was him telling me I kill every plant we'd ever had & I surely couldn't grow a garden. Determined to prove him wrong, I went out & rented a rototiller to prep the spot at the side of our house. I planted that garden with love & a lot of hope. He had no hope for it & told me often, it would die & nothing would grow. I am sad to say, I let it get to me & began to believe it also. I stopped watering that garden or even checking on it. A few things survived somehow but mostly I had failed.

So as much as I loved that my new house had this garden plot all ready for me, I was glad to have an excuse to not plant it that first summer. What if I really couldn't grow a garden? I would be failure I was often I reminded I was. Well last summer was our first full summer in our new house & man had I grown to love this house like no other I had ever lived in. It was so much more than just a house, it was where my kids & I started over. It was everything I ever wanted in a house. It was our perfect little home. I talked all winter about our garden. My son & I planned it as part of our homeschool earth science curriculum. But as spring was approaching summer, I had taken no action. I heard that old story in my head. Thank goodness for my son who was like come on Mom, we have to do this. So I asked my neighbor (a gardening expert) to borrow some tools & to give me his best advice. He offered me this..."Every summer is an experiment. Some things grow, some don't. It doesn't always make sense. Just plant what you like, make sure it has water & something is bound to grow." With that away we went. I had NO idea what I was doing. I over planted that garden last summer & was nervous about it all of the time. But guess what? Things grew! Lots of things. Some things didn't, not many. We feasted on green beans, tomatoes, peppers & butternut squash last summer.

This summer, I put that garden in with enthusiasm & confidence. I tried new things & put in what also flourished last summer. I love checking on this little garden. I was away from home for about 10 days but over the weekend was back. I woke early Saturday morning & went straight out there. I was like a kid on Christmas morning. I had PEAS!!!!! Have you ever seen peas grow? Holy heck, they are beautiful. The blossoms are so sweet & delicate. They have these thin thread like vines that curly q & spiral up, down & around everything. Something about peapods just seems magical to me & the way the morning sun made them transparent felt even more magical!

Over the weekend, I posted this photo of my garden on Facebook. A friend simply typed "Thriving" as her response. WOW! This was my message from Spirit. Thrive is one of my 3 words for 2018. I want to remember daily that being alive is a gift. We are not meant to simply survive, we are meant to thrive! My garden is thriving! It is an external expression of how I feel inside, of how I live my life now.

My cousin gave me a big smile with her comment on my photo "I love how when you first started your garden you were a bit hesitant about how it would go, and look at it now! Wow!" All I could think was how scary it is sometimes to own a home as a single woman but damn I am proving myself to be oh so capable! This new life of mine blows my mind sometimes. Like my little garden, I am thriving....