New Year's Resolution

The Weight of Living (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I opened a book today and was reminded: "The world was once a wild garden" (Eagle & Chesser, 2014).

A wild garden.

The distance between that riotous, unkempt world and this one is a measure I do not know. It's a calculation I cannot perform.

This is more about faith than mathematics.

There is no path back to that wild garden, nor any I'd want to travel if I did find such a way. The past is memory reconstructed.  What I partially know is that I am willing to walk a different way than the road I walk now as this road is mostly about domination and consumption.

And I've grown so very tired of each.

So I'm promising myself, here, in this quasi-public space of digital intention to begin to tend a garden this spring.  Not a metaphorical one, but rather one made up of seed and dirt, water and light. When I moved to the where I live now, I planted a garden that first spring and cared for it. The clay-like ground was less than easy to turn, but I was inspired, focused and ended up with blisters on my palms. A dozen years have passed and the garden still grows, still finds itself arched towards the sun, but each year it lacks my care, my commitment.

I plan to get muddy this spring, to file my nails, to surrender to what I cannot control.
I promise to do what must be done in order to turn the earth.