For many avid garden lovers, this weekend’s stunning, Premier Plant Sale would have been all the reason needed to head to The Bloedel Reserve. Not me. Not quite. The main reason I carved out time on an otherwise busy Friday to hop a ferry across the sound was to walk and sit, and kneel once again within those immense, lush, silent spaces that make up one of my favorite gardens, to attune my city-battered eyes and ears to a world that one can actually see and hear breathing, and to breathe with it. I went, first, for healing and wonder time in the garden and once again found my vision-hungry heart stretched and fed. There is big magic afoot on Bainbridge Island and it is always worth the effort to immerse oneself within it.

The air was cool and wet, pregnant with woodland smells and mist, and birdsong.

Along deep, shady pathways, wondrous things are happening. Tomorrow there will be different, wonderful things happening. This is exactly as it should be.

Look around, maybe just over the crest of that grassy hill. Some important, much-needed lesson awaits you, awaits your discovery and affirmation. Are you game?

Yes, of course I brought plants home from the sale. Several of them as a matter of fact. But no matter how amazing these new garden members are (that’s one of them to the right), they were not my primary reason for visiting. For me, one of the great beauties of ‘Bloedel’ is this,   “…the best things that you could ever possibly hope to take home from this wondrous place are not for sale and cannot be bought. They are not reserved for the highest bidder, but are instead yours for the seeing, the hearing, the smelling, if only you will walk a bit, tarry a bit, and as always, if you’ll merely say, yes.”

Namasté, my friends.

It’s early yet, but already this winter-dormant garden is beginning to push upward and out, a transformation worthy of careful attention. You won’t see much if you’re standing, though. Not at this stage. No, for now the magic is close to the ground. If you were standing here in my garden with me I’d tell you, “Go on, risk it. Get down on your hands and knees. Let your elbows get a little wet. Belly up to my emerging shade wonderland, my friend.”

Soon enough these tender new shoots, these unfolding wonders will have knit themselves together into a lush, intricate, verdant quilt of life. You’ll be scarcely be able to see even the smallest patch of soil before long. And then, yes then it will make perfect sense to find some higher vantage point, a way to look down upon it all from above. For now though, I hope you can see why my humble shade garden seems best, viewed in tiny, bite-size vignettes . . . and from a crawl. (Click on the image below to see a much larger version.)

Each of the photos in this blog post (with the exception of the one below), was captured with a Canon G-12 point and shoot camera, in much the way you see me below capturing what turned out to be the first shot in this blog post. This self-portrait was captured with my iPhone 5, the aid of a Joby GorillaPod and one of my favorite photo apps, Camera+.

Meditations On A Quiet Winter Walk

(I share this more to remind myself than presume to inform anyone else…)

A walk, pregnant with moments of recognition,

whispered koans, repeated…

insights settling into awareness,

affirmations of invisible truths revealed…

Wonders seem even sweeter,

shared.

(The type I’ve used here is intentionally small, and with its curvaceous script flourishes, asks you to slow your eyes and look carefully, just as I needed to do when framing up each shot. You may click on any image individually to see a larger and more legible version…)

Namasté

Perused the lecture schedule to see which speakers you want to hear?

Days like today are never simple. Most of us, even if we know we are loved have some achey corner of our lives that remains stained with loss or regret. Most of us face our days as courageously as we can, but hold, somewhere deep inside the knowledge that we were not enough for someone, not enough to keep them from leaving us, not enough for them to treat us generously, or fairly, not enough for them to love us the way we long to be loved. Days like this give us the chance to remind others how beautiful they are to us. But they may also, unintentionally serve as days that remind us love has not treated us quite as kindly as we were taught to hope it would, and that all the saccharine sweet wishes in the world will not make even one of them taste any more like the honey that is love returned.

This is for each of you who has ever experienced the horror of having been thrown away by someone. It is for those who have been lied about, stolen from, made fun of. It is for those who remain unseen, under-appreciated, frozen by fear.

Today, may you find permission to begin forgiving yourself for those achey scars you suspect make you unloveable. May you find some small measure of permission to love yourself a bit more generously, if simply by realizing that you are not at all alone in feeling so alone. And may that in turn free you to drop your guard, if only a little, to let another venture closer where they can begin to love you too.

This Is For All The Lonely People   (Remember this song by America?)