So we sow..

It's planting season.

When the minerals of earth and a trickle of rain will feed new life again.  Gardening can make a mother of anyone in the bringing plant to life and sustaining it, despite climate or pest.  A seed enveloped in an earthen womb, breaks through a new creation.  It is splendid in bloom and reaches for maturity, and finds a means to reproduce for a very chance at eternity.

It is never an ordinary thing to discover delicate shoots of green emerge from hibernation, commanding a presence to stretch upward and outward toward survival.  For the perennials that return, I rejoice for their appearance and erase the doubt I had harbored as to their viability after a long winter.  They claim ownership of the land they take root in.  It is grand to behold.

Cycles are everywhere in nature, cycles that endlessly, effortlessly perpetuate themselves.  And, how can we deny the design in a beginning, middle and end....with an end that holds a key, or seed, to another beginning?  The beginning is so thrilling and new, so tender and compromised, yet it must survive for the sake of the next phase to come.   Youth is brilliant and vibrant, but it goes on to bear something better once time has ripened it's potential, and, so goes the production:  the birth of fruit and grain and vegetable, the true glory of the plant.  The plant is all about the produce now and funnels all it's energy toward it.

I noticed in the drought last year, however, that the produce was quickly squelched for the sake of the plant.  The strain of the oppressive heat and the lack of rain compromised the ability to bear any more.  The plant survived a time.  Some of the plants survived the entire summer, however, the harvest was weak, if nonexistent.

I could think of myself as a plant, bearing fruit.  The fruit is sweet and bright and full of promise.  Life is the circumstances we keep, like the elements that feed or oppress us.  Sometimes it is copious and bountiful and other times are harsh and lean.  Some of these circumstances are beyond control, and others, I, in fact, perpetuate.

As time marches this family onward and upward, I have felt the moments of channeling pure goodness to my children.  However, it has become more hectic than I would like at times, and precious energy becomes diverted, even wasted.  It gets to be a place of survival and no longer production and bounty. So, I must account for that.  I must find a time to water when there is no rain.  I must provide shade from a scorching world.  I must synthesize light, and purify the air and become a place for my tender new growth to thrive year after year, displaying their beauty to the light of the sun.