First, thank you for your encouraging and generous responses to my announcement that I’ve moved my email newsletter to the Substack platform. If you’re receiving this, then there’s nothing more you need to do to go on receiving my words in your inbox. However, this shift to Substack does offer us some wonderful new options. Now, you won’t only have the choice of reading my words via email, but will also be able to find them on the Substack website or app. If you choose to become a paid subscriber, you’ll even be able to leave comments on my posts, access a full archive of previous posts, and you’ll receive all of my “church writing,” too. I’m looking forward to sharing some of the work I’ve been doing as Writer-in-Residence at my church with this community of paid subscribers.
Whether you continue with a free subscription or a paid one, I am incredibly grateful for your presence here.
I’m writing these words with a gratitude that is deep and wide. We’ve had days (weeks, really) of hot, humid, stormy weather and have spent the last 36 hours with no electricity, water, or cell service along with a broken generator. At 3 am our power was finally restored, and today the heat has broken as well. I’m sitting outside in the sweet shade of cloudy skies, and the cool air is so wonderfully distracting I’m not quite sure I’ll be able to finish this post before heading out deeper into the garden with my dead-heading scissors and weed bucket. The whole world feels as sweet and soft as a favorite pillow, and if I could I’d lay my head down on a cloud. I hate weeds as much as any gardener, but sometimes they are just the invitation we need to drop every other demand and simply be in our gardens. At least, that’s how I feel when the weather is cool.
Things are not the same. The weather has shifted, and I recently understood that I have shifted, too. Last Saturday at an author event, my friend, fellow writer, and new bookstore owner Shawn Smucker interviewed me in front of a small audience. He reminded me that I claim in my books the garden “is not my happy place.” The garden is not, has never been, a place of perfect peace for me. It has its paradise moments, but they are only moments.
And yet when Shawn invited me to say more, I realized that a dozen years keeping gardens here at Maplehurst in Pennsylvania have changed me. I am happier in my garden. Every day. No matter the weather. But why?
I think I am happier and feel more at peace in my garden, because I have grown. I no longer hold quite so tightly to outcomes. Garden disasters no longer feel like the end of the world. I know now that the sky sometimes falls and then a new day finds it bright and blue and sheltering again. This is true in the garden. This is true in our lives.
The sky over my home has lately given us lightning. It has given us hail. But today it is pouring out gentle light, birdsong, and a whispering breeze. I swear it is telling me that things are not the same. They never do stay the same.
Good news.