I feel like I’m leaving in parts; As I age, holes appear; wrinkles carve their canyons in my skin; eyes strain to sense details; mind clouds; cells struggle to replace themselves. Can I learn to see beyond the holes to something gained rather than lost? Does spirit automatically fill the emptiness?

There is a strange comfort in these holes, the loss of limbs, cells, parts. The stars still shine through them. And after all, “stardust” is what we are.

At the same time, there is an urgency to the fact that we will never know, cannot ever know what we really are. Spirituality is our attempt to create meaning out of that mystery.

If we see our lives as gardens, why then, do we clean and plant the garden when we know it will grow thick with weeds soon after? Or to use another metaphor, why do we clean our rooms when we know they will soon become messy with the entropy of living?

Can the true meaning of, or metaphor of, the garden be that it is something beyond, or further inside us, part of us still, either way?

Can gardening speak of a cure for the insanities of the world, murder, torture, war, famine, and the political and social webs which create and imprison beauty and freedom?

In the reflection of the puddle I see my tortured face, my stony frailty, monstrous melting glacier, shuddering scrawniness, dialed-in stupidity, creaturely, Gollemy.

Can the garden cure all that?

Yes. Out of the dirt I create myself, muddy, filthy, and beautiful. There will be no other like me or this moment.

No matter how down or weak you feel, cherish that uniqueness, all parts of it.

Meet me just beyond the garden gate, nowhere else.