There is a garden - Indeed, it is Spring there

It’s been a quiet season. These past few months have been wrapped in a soft blanket of grief. Autumn and grief seem to be so close to one another. 

My Daddy died in September one day before his 88th birthday. 

Nola said he got to celebrate his birthday in heaven.

We played Linden Lea at his funeral. It was the hottest September day I’ve ever remembered. All the Roses were blooming in the Cemetery Rose Garden. His flowers were entwined into a beautiful cross with a garland around the coffin. There were bluebells woven through the centre of the cross. The bluebell woods along the stray lanes and almost lost to modern life ‘Twitterns’ of Sussex were a beloved place for Him. The sort of place that goes beyond the stuff of earth. 

I miss him. His fierce, artistic, guileless spirit, his passion to know and experience life fully and deeply, his stark remarks, his perennial sayings, his stories. And yet, as the months have passed I’ve sensed that spirit still. It is the same but different; enlarged, unfettered, alive, soaring, close. Tangible as his old Irish Shillelagh leaning up against the bookcase. Untroubled by illness, loss, trauma, doubt, it shines, purified and pure by a place where we will one day see one another and love one another properly.

A place beyond the dim frosted ice glass sky of winter.

In May ( my Father’s favourite month ) I heard a voice. I’ve heard a similar voice only 3 times in my life I think. It wasn’t audible but it was clear as a bell. It came from behind my right shoulder. 

The voice said ‘There is a garden. Indeed, it is Spring there.’ My father was a gardener. He used to say ‘I paint with a spade.’ 

At that point he was far from his beloved garden, and laid in a hospital bed. I knew that this word was for both him and me. When I told him about it he said yes. He could understand. He knew. 

The girls have had dreams of their Grandad and in every one he was in a beautiful garden. 

I have felt his companionship on dog walks, as I read through his old diaries and school letters and while praying the rosary.

The diaries and letters are some of my most valued possessions. Garden diaries, travel diaries, liturgical diaries but mostly, plain, brief, simple records of everyday life.

How much beauty in the ordinary of those words recounting nothing more lofty than the planting of spring bulbs, a birthday tea, the anniversary of a wedding.

A glimmer of the ordinary everyday. How we take such days for granted!

It has made me realise that however, unimportant and flawed these simple, broken fragments of everyday life are a way of remembering, re- membering, re-connecting with something, though gone, remains in another form in the present moment.

"The details make life holy. If you want a little happiness in life don’t forget to look at the little things. It is a poet’s work to see the incidental, pluck it, place an appropriate silence around both sides and see the profound in what passes for a passing moment. It is an artist’s job to as much discover art as create it. Prayer is a way of making the common profound by pausing, tying knots around a moment, turning our life into a string of pearls."- Noah Ben Shea 

I have found myself going inward during the last few months. This inwardness has been further compounded by the lockdowns.

 I am beginning to feel a stirring of life within again now. Like the little bulbs I planted back in September that are slowly being awakened by faint yet growing light. 

Now as I find myself writing here once more I have a strange conflict. A perennial conflict. I want to write and share and yet I find platforms like this uncomfortable. They kind of wordlessly make it seem as if the one writing might have found the answers to life, the universe and everything.

I definitely haven’t.

Anything I write here is a fractional, edited version of my own limited, growing understanding based on my own experiences. 

Thank God for Grace. I need it. Every day.

Yet I’ve come to realise and accept that it seems that like the bulbs, much if my life is to be spent in quiet, unseen places which is probably where I feel most at home. Yet, seasonally, at the waxing of the light I stir. And each time of emergence finds me the same but a little different. 

Closer perhaps ( I hope) from the perennial plunging of tentative roots and reaching upward of tender shoots to that great light which awakens.