Meditations in your fathers garden
You walk the garden and you feel them buried beneath. There’s an energy humming, a vibration of life, something sleeping, something wonderful, waiting in the dirt and the darkness. But waiting for what? The right conditions? The perfect season? Their best chance to be observed and admired by the best audience? You wonder what keeps such tiny treasures dormant and why they hide their beauty from the world.
Sometimes they are seeds, treasure boxes packed full of potential energy, just waiting to be activated. Like the precocious acorn, buried and forgotten by some hungry squirrel, winding up to become a mighty oak tree. Sometimes it’s even creepier creatures, not so imbued with grace, but just as triumphant and mighty. Like the seven year cicadas, larva buried deep in the ground, cradled in darkness, surviving cold frozen winters, and connected by some soft rhythm, some universal alarm clock to say when it was time to emerge and burn their short bright life. Sometimes they’re the little twigs and buds of a cherry tree or a dogwood. Dead sticks and branches all winter long, waiting patiently, sleeping deeply, and then bursting their bouquets and painting the treeline with such a majestic glow that all matter of bird, bee and beast must bow in worship.
As you dig for weeds, reposition your garden and begin to lay down mulch for the season ahead, you spot the poppies and almost mistake them for milkweed. You leave them be and realize they’ll be ‘popping’, as they do, their burnt orange vanities by Memorial Day weekend, just in time to replace all the fading tulips in the garden bed. Out with the old, in with the new. And you can’t help but pause and ponder the mysteries of the invisible, wondering what other little sleeping beauties are lying two feet below your knees… and why.
These strange perennials of the garden and the cycles they’ve adapted seduce and fascinate you on this late spring day. Plants evolved in such a way to spend most of their time hibernating, living off last season’s sunny reserves, one eye open waiting for the right conditions and then bursting to life for a few short weeks, maybe a month, screaming in hubris at anyone willing to gaze, “Look at me! Bow to my glory”! Then fading again and falling back to sleep.
It’s the poppies, the elephant ears, the alliums, the montauk daisies, the hydrangea… All of them, nestled, cocooned into their bulbs, those tiny treasure boxes, waiting for their turn to burst and be seen. Tiny and dreaming of being something grander.
You think then about all those little things inside you, buried just beneath the surface. Those tiny treasures of your personality, your capabilities, your unrealized potential, all wound up tightly like a ball of rubber bands, waiting to be untied and stretched further, snapped out into the world. You think of the way you’ve waited so patiently for your next big job, your next big role, and a chance to express yourself differently as a professional, catching the attention from a busy world.
You think also about the creative expression you yearn to foster, things smoldering inside, waiting to be engulfed with flame, like the many little stories, outlines and ideas you have laying dormant two feet under the surface in your head. Ideas waiting to become something more, dreams yearning to grow into words, words searching for the fertile grounds of other ears, other minds. And stories that can shine in ways that spread joy and inspire grace.
Creativity catches the eyegaze of one’s soul, catches fire and beckons the attention of birds, bees and beasts. And you wonder again, why do all these things – bulbs, seeds, buds, larva… ideas, dreams, ambitions, desires – why do they sleep at all? And how do we ever know when it is time to stir them from that slumber, when will they come out to bloom? Soon, you should hope.
Soon and not for long. It’s that fleeting notion that helps you slow the ticking clock of expectations. It’s the fragility of expectant flowers that soothes you. It’s the promise of a neatly wrapped present that delivers giddy joy in the tomorrow. And for now you dig reverently in the dirt, you pause, then breathe deeply and hold onto the promise of unseen treasures arriving in their own time.
Paul Carreo 