Sublime

Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats.

Hope was a dimension of the mortal,

“Death is never an ending in nature.” And because a garden is always a place of becoming, to make and tend one is a gesture of hope, that these seeds planted will sprout and grow, this tree will bear fruit, that spring will come, and so, probably, will some kind of harvest. It’s an activity deeply invested in the future.

When you reach the end of this life, can this version of you hold a feeling of satisfaction, without many regrets and actually joyful? I believe you can.

Later, I would be humbled by our naïve brand of arrogance. Later, I would stumble upon the path to a better world not in spiritual theories or in the rarefied heights of my idealism but in the softness of a broken heart, and in the fires of daily life.