Gardens

I take after my mother in probably all things, but mostly in gardening (not the vegetable type). I love to have flowers, plants, set areas to enhance an outside area (altho right now that has been put seriously on hold), but nonetheless, I love garden areas. And in every area outside, front and back, I have drawn and scaled out a garden area or areas to bring the house finally to fruition of "home". They are literally all over the house these little drawings and while they change a little here and there, they are, at the core, the same, gardens of color. And while they are on hold right now, and every essence of doing anything outside with the yard seems overwhelming and not enjoyable, the drawings wait patiently for me to 'wind up', begin to move, dig, and frame in for the future finishing touch. I think that going to a home that has some sort of gardening around them make the house more like home, and truthfully I have no idea why. The only think I can say is that Thomas Kincade greatly captured the idea of a "homey" in his paintings of cottages with flowering gardens surounding those homes in abundance. The pictures just speak home, comfort, peace, joy, and on and on and on. Dont' you agree? The view of flowers overhanging a picket fence and flowing around a homes edge makes it 'home'. And this is why, I believe, I love gardens, they make a home look like a home from the outside.

While I have this plan to make a garden around my home and fill it with color and the look of joy and comfort, the truth is that would only be a facade right now. While I have moments of joy, brief as they are, I find that more than not the moments of sadness are stronger. I know, without doubt, that I am not alone in this feeling, maybe my reasons are different from yours, its still sadness. And in my failing attempt to find something to read, something to identify me with something out there, I have been reading just about anything, to find someone who knows or can identify with my feelings. So, on a fluke, really a fluke, I picked up something to read that wasn't a guide book and found myself reading "The Shack". I am only half way thru Chapter 4 and without giving anything away, I will tell you that each chapter, named diligently and descriptively, has a quote beneathe the chapter name. So far each quote has given an insight to the writer's mindset and a quick view of the chapter ahead. Last night, beginning Chapter 4, the quote was more than insightful, it was more than descriptive, it described sadness. "Sadness is a wall between two gardens-" Kahlil Gibran. I immediately idenitified with this statement, it gave sadness an identity, a figure that I could pick out of a line up, so to speak, and this, believe it or not, is exactly what sadness is, a wall. Just like these words between the beautiful garden on the left and the desolate garden on the right, that wall looks the same. Its as tho, I am standing on the wall and looking as what was and what I want to be again and where my emotions and heart is a large marjority of the time; a wall between two gardens. I want so desperately to be in the garden on the left but standing on the wall I am pulled between the two easily on a moments change. And in an attempt to find out how God is identifying with my sadness, I am looking, searching, digging to find something in "His Word" that will stand out and speak to me the way this one, half sentence did, and I have found some here and there. Today I searched for my word "garden", knowing or presuming that I would only be led to the info regarding the Garden of Eden, I was surprised to find more than this in Jeremiah. Jer 31:12 "....they will be like a well watered garden, and they will sorrow now more." Do you see the wall? It's the 'and' in this partial verse, the 'and' is the wall between two gardens. "And" a simple, non-jumping, non-descriptive, conjunction just became a noun. The well watered garden on the left is where, sometime I will be and I will sorrow no more without forgetting but now, right now, I am on the 'and', I am on the wall being pulled between two gardens.

I know, without doubt, that this wall, this finally described place that I am at, is not a thin wooden slat wall with a gate, but a long, thick wall of stone and rock. I know that this wall stands to challenge me and my faith, altho until this morning I hadn't realized that challenge it is exactly that, a challenge. So I stand on the wall, finally given a figure, finally the thing given description. The wall between two gardens, the wall between happiness and grief, the wall where I finally know I stand.