Gardner's Journal

I'm knee deep in mud, the sun in shining and my arms are heavy from moving heavy chunks of dirt. I'm dirty, sloppy and blissfully happy.

There exists a deep scar in my back yard that I made when I was "brainstorming" about my garden a couple of years ago. I dug this big hole and then my kids said, "we should build a pool there!" I abandoned my idea of a gentle pond outside the back door and went to work trying to build a pool.

I never really wanted a pool there -- I didn't relish the idea of looking out the 9 months of the year and seeing a blank, open space. Even though a pond would be frozen, it could be beautiful and quiet...meditative in a sense.

Finally, this year, it became obvious that if we were going to build a pool it would be better to wait a few more weeks. And I became more committed to the idea of a pool being off a bit and perhaps hidden behind some rock walls, shrubbery.

The unformed, ugly presence in my yard is now being transformed into a beautiful pond.

It's a lot of work from ugly to understated. From mud to meditative. From gaping to graceful.
There's mud to be moved, rocks to be unearthed, scrabble to be cleared.

Not a job for the unitiated. I find myself sitting with damp early all around, cool mud seeping through my jeans, water sloshing in my boots. The earth is stubborn and hard and it doesn't want to move. I could tell it, "you're going to be so beautiful!" but it doesn't really care about that, I don't think. It's stuck in its state, frozen, unmoving.

And once again, I hear God's whispers to me. "You are unformed potential. Stubborn. Unmoving. Let me.."