The Garden

Buzzing bees and the drifting breeze.

The heavy sun beating its rays onto your back, the slowly wafting scent of upturned soil, and the hefty feel of newly released earth beneath your spade. In a world so consumed by 24 hour markets and fast food drive thru's, you take a moment to breathe in the experience. To let the feeling of new beginnings take you away. You are where you love to be.

It is exhausting work that sometimes provides little reward and even less appreciation. You find yourself weeding and watering in the deepest months of summer, done when the years heat is at its fullest. Others will ask but never understand why you choose to perform the tasks that you do. While a trip to to grocery store would reap the same benefits as months of labor and patience, they would provide experiences on different ends of the spectrum. You wonder why they do not see the beauty of the task itself. It is tiring and it is freeing, a complete conundrum to even you some times.

You curse the bugs and beg for the rain, rising and falling with the growth of your garden. You feel pride as your crops swell and ripen, readying for harvest, giving you a gift that will feed your body and soul. You feel hope and loss as plants thrive and die, and you feel a connection to a time before today. It is a practice that has evolved completely and yet continues in the way it always has.

Steady throughout all of time, even as the sciences push for more answers. The trues principles of gardening will remain the same, cultivation and harvest. Growth, death, and rebirth are the laws you learn from the very beginning. It teaches you lessons beyond what you may learn in a classroom or textbook. You are gifted first hand lessons of responsibility, and held accountable for the success of your crops. It prepares you for the harshest times and comforts you with the steady presence of change.

You will come to understand the desperation of monotony and the wild hope of changes to come. Your garden provides you with a respect for the natural course of life, as you see it in every moment. It gives an experience that cannot be told by secondhand tales, instead it begs the truest form of cooperation. To experience it, you have to perform the act itself. To appreciate it, you have to loose yourself in the task. To love it, you have to understand why you began gardening, why you chose to fulfill the task instead of outsourcing for the sake of effortlessness and ease. Among the insects and soil, you will find a peace of mind that only the act of gardening can gift you.