Fresh

and lovely

Monday morning and the garden is rain fresh … I stand in it, listening, and feel the disarming beauty filter into my body. Ray by sun ray, breeze by breeze, bird sound by song by sound. It’s early. I mistook 6.30 am for 7.30 when I woke up today and it makes an unmistakable difference to how the world feels. A wood pigeon calls from the fence, low and guttural. On repeat. Rooks caw from the field, but mostly it’s quiet. A still sleeping sound…. Light is bright and soft, an emerging light entering into everything, not yet warm. The garden is very cool, I need a cardi (there is one permanently kept draped over the chair in our kitchen) and that extra small delight of cradling a hot cup of tea adds to the inordinate pleasure I feel in this moment, now.

This garden, these plants, this moment are like a draft of good medicine. Something to inhale and store cell deep. I am changed by it, in ways too subtle to describe here in words. The smell is so green. I think the rain has released scents from every blade, stem and leaf, it pours into our garden room, filling it and my nostrils. Roses, Peonies, Iris and Lavender are drenched with water and sparkle.

The garden feels like a complete prayer, a silent, grace-filled alleluia that opens itself wide to take me into the folds of itself, like I’m one of its own, an equal part. A beloved. The ‘hug’ is generous and without boundary or condition. This is where God is… where presence and Presence come together. Where love rises out of the soil through root and stem declaring itself to be love. Tiny birds flutter across from one fence to another, barely bigger than my pinkie, they are the small punctuation marks of this love story.

I wonder what else this day may contain, reluctant to pull away from what’s happening now. Can I just stay with it and ignore the usual demands of a new week beginning….? I realise this is quite unrepeatable in experience. I won’t be the same, neither will the garden, the sun, the air I breathe. I realise also that I cannot extend this moment in any way because it isn’t based in time. The clock on the cooker has stopped at 12.00 - this seems entirely and perfectly right. Held within the eternal and that infinite portal of everything allows me uninterrupted bliss. Rare. Spiritual. Gifted. Happy Monday.

Till the next time…

A