Renewal

I haven’t written here in a very long time. The last time was just after the New Year in fact. Then recently I received an e-mail from WordPress asking me to renew the domain for this blog. I had to make a decision if I should continue this blog or close it down. I have been doing what I am quick to criticize everyone else of doing: nothing. Well not nothing exactly, but I have been so busy wrapped up with work that I haven’t been doing anything else. Sound familiar?

I have been in the garden watering and weeding over the last few days. It has been hot and beautiful, perfect weather to be a gardener. I love the process of the planting and I love looking after the garden once it is done – the weeding and the watering. For me it is like meditation. There is sitting and walking meditation, could there be gardening meditation too?

I learned how to garden from my father over forty years ago as a child. I had my own garden in our backyard and he would help me plant pansies and marigolds. He showed me how to take the seedlings out of the pots, how far apart to put them, and then how to dig the hole, put the young plants in, and then fill in with the earth and finally to water them. It’s what we would do my Dad and I in the early spring after the May long weekend in sunny old Winnipeg.

I usually forgot about the garden as the summer progressed and we headed down to the lake for July and August. When I would come back after the Labour Day long weekend for school I would run down to see the garden and it would be bright with pansies and the marigolds would be strong and high. My Dad looked after it all summer for me.

My father passed away in January and I am wondering if that is why I stopped writing my blog. I think I always wrote it for him. I don’t really like to admit that, but I know it is the truth. It gave us something to talk about, something that kept us connected as we each grew older. I know that he didn’t always agree with what I wrote but he loved that I wrote. When my brothers and I were cleaning up his things we found files of everything that I had ever written. Not strange for a parent to do that, but I found it strange for my father. It was not how I thought of him: sentimental. Perhaps I didn’t know him as I thought I did, or I am more like him than I thought.

My garden this year is quite spectacular. There aren’t any pansies or marigolds, but I planted it exactly the way my Dad taught me to. I get out there on the weekends and I prune, deadhead, weed and I water. Just as I know my father did when I was down at the lake for the summer. He was there making sure it would be there for me when I came home.

I am not sure that writing this blog, or life, for that matter is any different. We need to be consistent, and work at it and give it the love and respect that it deserves.  A garden, a blog, or life: You water it and weed it and give it some love. You work at it. I thought my father was showing me how to garden when I was a child, I think now that he was simply showing me how to live.