From My Garden in Winter

Think there's not much to write about gardening in winter? Wait, I think I disagree. Winter's a good time to enjoy the seed catalogues filling my mailbox, count up last year's leftover seeds and meditate on the hard, frozen ground. Here's a favorite quote of mine I often look to at this time of year:

Notes from THE FAITHFUL GARDENER in the depths of winter--

Eden lies underneath the empty field, the new seed goes first to the empty and open places—even when the open place is a grieving heart, a tortured mind or a devastated spirit.

What is this faithful process of spirit and seed that touches empty ground and makes it rich again? It’s greater workings I cannot claim to understand. But I know this: Whatever we set our days to might be the least of what we do, if we do not also understand that something is waiting for us to make ground for it, something that lingers near us, something that loves, something that waits for the right ground to be made so it can make its full presence known.

I am certain that we stand in the care of this faithful force, that what has seemed dead is dead no longer, what has seemed lost, is no longer lost, that which some have claimed impossible, is made clearly possible, and what ground is fallow is only resting—resting and waiting for the blessed seed to arrive on the wind with all Godspeed.

And so it will.