Today I spent a couple of hours in the front garden. In the heat of the late afternoon it wasn’t my top pick of where to be, but it needed some attention – grass to cut, weeds to pull, some large ferns to chop down. It looks a lot better than it did, though still could use weed eating around the fence and flower beds along with finishing pulling weeds…rain stopped play!

I have a circular walled flower bed in the garden…it looks great when it’s tidy, but was severely overgrown. The culprit was some form of ivy-like plant that had spread across the whole circle. It had twisted itself around the branches of my rose bush and it took quite a bit of time to loosen it. As I spent a good while there clearing it, gently pulling, cutting and unraveling it, I got thinking about life in general, and of course my life in particular!

• It is so easy for something invasive and damaging to take over and cover the beauty in life…in this case the failure of my marriage and the feeling that I’ve lost who I am.
• It’s gonna take time to unravel things and find out all the parts that have been touched by this. You think you’ve got it all and then you find another offshoot!
• There’s patience and tenderness needed in the separating and clearing – there were many, many twists as the weed sought to wrap fully around the bush. It takes time, intention and kindness…oh, that dreaded time!
• There were times I had to trust in the strong roots of the rose bush as I pulled the weed off – they didn’t fail. I need to trust in my strong roots and inner ability to survive and thrive.

The rose bush was amazingly still flowering underneath the tentacles…now I (and everyone who passes my garden) can actually see it!

Here endeth the metaphor! (Sadly I didn’t take a before picture to show the amazing contrast!)