Let the Green Leaves Unfurl

Let the green leaves unfurl from my soul. Let the rain pound down from the sky.

This is what we are: gardeners, working with our hands in damp soil and sun. Cultivating the earthy, necessary shoots of love, the flamboyant flowers of joy, and the tall climbing vines of hope. Those vines, they twist and wind tenaciously around the fences guarding our hearts; they’re an everyday miracle of waking up and invisibly growing by inches.

We build fences to keep our gardens neat and tidy. We plant in rows and stake evenly. Because we need the idea that our seeds will come up orderly.  We know we have to start planting now and it’s less scary to do it with some sort of map in our heads. Then the plants break through the soil and we water the love and inhale the perfume of joy and we watch those trembling hopeful vines curl themselves up and around our fences, and we wonder at their future.

Sometimes they die. We watch them wither. And maybe we water them and try to save them and maybe we don’t. We untangle the dead tendrils from our fences, lifting and separating, and throw them in the burn barrel with the rest of the pruning.  And that’s okay, because here’s the thing about hope: it pops back up out of the dirt faster than any weed. Give it another chance to blossom; it’ll be morning glories, it’ll be sweet peas and wisteria. It’ll be a riotous explosion of color and sun and delight.