patience is a virtue
Just the other day I took this photo of an oakleaf hydrangea that grows in my garden. It looks like autumn, when really we are just a week away from the first day of spring.
This plant likes to take its time emerging from winter. In fact, the year after I planted it, I thought it had not survived the cold weather. But I was glad that I didn’t pull it up and throw it in the trash heap, because weeks later it emerged from its long winter nap and joined the party of green in full swing all around it.
One of the things I like best about gardening is that it teaches you patience. As a requirement.
Not one of my best traits, in general. The world we live in these days is so fast-paced, we don’t like to wait, we want everything now, instantaneously. We are getting used to things working that way. I would love to wake up one morning and see all my flowers full-size, in bloom, and well tended.
But nature doesn’t work that way. It takes its own sweet time, it doesn’t care, really, what we humans have to say about it. And it likes to surprise us, with its ever changing litany of rage and fury and smiles and cheer and days of weeping and quite a bit of just plain gray.
We can’t predict the weather.
We can’t take it for granted. We can’t make it go away, or hurry up, or stop and stand still, or be what we want when we want it.
There’s a lesson in there.
Somewhere.
March 13th, 2010 at 2:00 pm
there is a lesson there for sure…
we tend to have lots of control over most everything else…but the weather, no way….
patience is not one of my strong points, either….I thought having children would help that….but damn, if it didn’t make it worse. good thing I stopped at two……
March 13th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
oh me, too, i was not a very patient mother, but my son is grown now and seems to have survived! now my mom, she worked in the elementary school cafeteria for years…that’s patience for you!
March 13th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
I have been watching the neighbors across the street, they who now live in my late beloved Mary’s House of Many Colors, which perhaps makes me biased, but they have cleaned the fallen leaves from all the flower beds and with them some of the small hydrangea bushes, and with that, some of my memories of the summers Mary was alive. I started to say something, but I said something last year, and they will have to figure it out on their own. Mary was a gardener and knew when to sit back and leave things alone. Not these folks – Mary’s garden will soon be gone.
March 13th, 2010 at 4:26 pm
That would be so hard to watch…I wonder sometimes about what the next owner of this house will do to/with my garden…it is hard to imagine it being gone, or even it going on without me…but such is life, i guess!
March 14th, 2010 at 3:41 am
Thank you for your lovely message. I adore the photographs on your blog especially, they are so very beautiful 🙂
March 14th, 2010 at 7:59 am
Hi Kelly… I love this photo. Absolutely gorgeous. I thought to myself, I would buy a card with an image like that. But like many cards I buy with photos that draw me in, I would probably keep it for myself. 🙂
March 14th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Patience and trust in the universe. I think those are the two greatest lessons nature can teach us! Beautiful image!!
March 14th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Yes, and both so hard to learn…thanks!