Notes from Life and the Garden

Unabashedly in love with sunlight and growing things and the pain of walking away

So, in case you haven’t heard, I have a perfect puppy named Percy taking up a big chunk of my heart and time lately.

Percy makes me spend time outside which means I should have something to do while I’m there and since I am also in love with my own sobriety these days, sipping wine is not the vibe. Instead I have fallen deeeeeeeppp into my gardening and growing things era, which if you speak to me ever, you already know.

In the midst of this, I’ve been experiencing some relationship shifts in my life lately. My therapist of six years and I came to the conclusion that we had done the work we had come together to do and it was time to move on. I found forgiveness in a place I probably didn’t deserve it and it shifted something in me. I’m growing some new little business ideas that have me enlivened and excited, but require letting some other ideas simmer for a while. I passed a bit of a grief speed bump this weekend and needed to be extra kind to my tender heart.

Mostly, my little life on my small front porch in my charming neighborhood with my precious people and my puppy and my plants feels so dreamy right now. I take the fullest breaths every time I look up and see it again with new eyes.

So here’s a new poem about all of those things at once. I give you:

Sunlight: A Poem About Walking Away

I have a sister who puts her phone down somewhere in her house and walks away and forgets about it all the time.

Sometimes I wish I could be her, and sometimes I wish she would answer my fifty fucking text messages already.

Then I ask myself how I’d ever remember to water the plants and walk the dog and brush my teeth if I didn’t have all that down time waiting for her to tell me just what to do about this, that, or the other thing.

Sometimes, I hang on to certainty like the little whistle on the life vests nestled under your airplane seat. Too often, I’ve mistaken these for the oxygen mask and tried to breathe life out of making myself an emergency.

A thought that I thought just a passing thought becomes a curiosity to me, a rolling, rough-edged stone asking my brain to tumble it around until it is smooth and luminescent and just lovely enough.

I tuck these stones into my pockets, strew them across my altar, nestle them into the soil of my garden plants, and I set them free to learn what their own magic is.

I think to myself that this is what my favorite people have done for me. Softened my rawest edges with a patient upswing, sometimes giving me a gentle rise and sometimes upending me ungraciously and leaving me flat, looking up at the sky.

I’ve been in the habit of rushing to stand, brushing myself off, and staring back down at my own feet, my eyes drawn so tight around my field of vision that I become a fall risk of my volition.

But then there are the moments where I’ve stayed flat, remembering that the grass is made of single blades and that the air never actually stands still.

I’ve tucked myself into the same corner of the same couch each week for so long now that I’ve come to think it was the only corner with just enough sun and shade for me to grow.

I look across the room at a face now new to me and smile to see how much larger we’ve both become over time, how we’ve spread ourselves out in the open, and realize, quite suddenly, that these walls are too close together for where we are going. We both need enough space for our leaves to see the sunlight.

There’s something to be said for the easy spaces, the ones where we bring all the versions of ourselves before the mirror, dress them in fancy outfits and tell them how delightful they are, where our quirks are our best qualities.

It would be silly to think these contractions of time eternal. There is too much wonder in the turning of the wide world for this to be true. One day winter, the next day spring. A son once tiny grown to the size of a proud mother’s heart.

And what of the ones who can put us down and walk away at times? Knowing the stretch that lies before us is long enough that there will be one more next time, next time.

And if there should not be a next time, still there will have been this time in which the rays of the sun passed between us and left a familiar, faded spot on the carpet of our hearts where for

one

brief,

beautiful

moment

we really knew each other.

Here’s to sunlight and growing things. Especially us.