Today, when I write this, there are four weeks left of summer, more behind than ahead. My potted flowers that flourished rest now ’til their final slumber. In a leafy part of my garden, with sunflowers towering above, five pumpkins continue to deepen green on the soil. But once there were six. Without a healthy peduncle (stem) attached to the vine, a pumpkin will not survive. Everyday I water the patch, and one day, not too long ago, I moved a vine “to a better place” I ...
Five Ways to Stay Close to God
Breathing Yahweh
The summers I would visit my father at his care home, we sat outside on the enclosed patio decorated with hanging flower pots and garden chimes. Sometimes the smell of fried chicken would float our way from the fast food restaurant across the street. But my dad preferred donuts and coffee over chicken and french fries, so we sipped our coffee out of paper cups and wiped our sticky fingers on white napkins, as we commented on the going-ons in our world that day. Often lounging with us ...
What I Know for Sure
This summer, in my humble sized backyard, M planted vegetables seeds in my flower pots, buried sunflower seeds in front of my fence, and covered up pumpkin seeds in my modest garden. Labeled stakes were set in the dirt to remind us what sprouts to expect. Whenever I looked out my windows, or wandered into my backyard, I checked for any signs of stems busting through the soil. It didn’t take long for the pumpkin seeds to sprout leafy plants, and sunflower stems to shoot upwards, but the pots ...
How to Thrive When in The Muck
When my step sinks into the saturated grasses, I almost turn away. A few more steps will take me to marshy waters that pool above plants in these wetlands and I’m reminded again. Avoiding the mucky leads to dryness. But thriving comes when saturated with the water. Because what is there is no matter how much avoidance energy is expelled. The trials where we are planted come. The way of survival is to habitat in the tonic waters. When my son’s grade two ...
A List Forgetting Story with a Donut
“You should have warned me so I could have been prepared,” my eldest sister, D, complains. “Well, I thought it up just a couple of hours ago when in the shower,” I explained. I could see her eyes roll through my iPhone screen. “I want to go get a donut now,” she says. Beside me, my middle sister, G, and her husband, J, take a bite of their chocolate covered, cream filled donut. “Mmm…good,” G teases. I laugh. I’d stayed in the shower too long that ...
Thriving in a Comparative and Competitive World
“I wasn’t a good figure skater. There was a girl 2 grades below me better than me.” “You are an excellent skater and were good at figure skating,” I replied to my grand daughter. “No I wasn’t,” she argued back I grappled for words. “You skated two to three times per week, so you could do other things, while those other gals skated more. But you were not a bad skater because they had more practice.” She’d just finished telling me a story of a ...
