State of Grace

As the warm weather returned, my dear wife and I have been puttering out in the back yard like everyone else. In our case, it’s really just a patio. However, there’s some furniture, a little waterfall and some things growing out there. So we dig, we sweep, we prune and water, picking up every stray leaf that dares to attempt the establishment of a foothold in our little nature center. My bride has spent so much time out in the back 40 (that’s feet, not acres) that we’ve begun to call it our room addition. All across the country I imagine countless other folks have been up to just about the same thing. After the relative hibernation of winter, and in our case the record setting rains of southern California, folks naturally gravitate out of doors. All the more so because we seem to have been created to respond to nature. In fact, we derive a nearly spiritual pleasure from interaction with our beloved friends in the plant kingdom. Not surprisingly, we are chemically and biologically bound to them as well, since we produce the carbon dioxide which they require and they turn it back into the life-giving oxygen we need to live. It’s a complimentary relationship which adds credence to my personal belief that we were both created with such a symbiotic interaction in mind. Today’s poem is one I wrote a few years ago while sitting in a particularly beautiful corner of a nursery one evening, on a day not so unlike this one. I offer it with hope that you might get out of doors in the next day or two and have the opportunity to sample the peace I felt as I penned those words.

State of Grace
There is a magic in the stately grace
A well kept garden knows
A wonder in the company
Of all that’s green and grows
There is a comfort in the quiet
Of a garden’s soft embrace
Which draws me in and beckons
Me to tarry in that place
Man was created in a garden
Perhaps that’s why where e’er I roam
I always wander into gardens
Because they feel like home
By Frank Carpenter ©