New Life in the Beauty of our Garden

Even though we’ve had some things happen lately that are hard to swallow, I want to point out that the majority of my life and how I feel about life in general is completely wonderful. Even though it’s not always easy, it’s still a beautiful and rewarding process. I think it’s so important to be aware of your perspective of life and your interpretation of events in your world.

I didn’t always have this perspective though. I had to go through a lot of experiences that were really trying for me to finally understand how I can have power over my life. It took me awhile to realize that no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to control things or people that occur outside of me. The outside world is outside of my ability to control it. I can impact it – but I can’t control it. The one thing I DO have control over, and always will, is myself. My reaction to those external factors. My choice of action, my choice of feeling and my choice of thoughts. Once I learned this, I realized I could actually change how I was feeling at a moment’s notice – regardless of what was happening around me. This honestly changed my life.

We had a really cool realization this weekend. All summer we’ve been researching, planning, measuring, and preparing our yard for this beautiful xeriscape garden we wanted to put in. It took a lot of hard work – lots of time involved with the research and physical labor involved with preparing the spot. Every weekend that went by when we weren’t ready to actually plant the flowers and plants, I was disappointed. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that waiting and learning about this process was necessary in preparing us. We were able to plant our garden this last weekend and it was such a great feeling. Looking back, I know that I needed to be patient and take the time to really go through the process the right way in order to have the best results. And now we do – we accomplished the creation of life and beauty in nature, even though we’re going through a painful process of not being able to be with all three of our little girls.

Life is like that too – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve hated being stuck in the middle of a really challenging experience, wanting to be somewhere else, to have something in my situation different than what it was, feeling like it was never going to end or get better and then one day, it just does. And I’m looking back at that steep mountain I just climbed and knew that had I not gone through what I had gone through, I wouldn’t have been able to take away such a beautiful experience from it. I wouldn’t appreciate the goodness in my life as much, had I not gone through the badness of it. So many people go through their lives not really understanding the depth of “ups” and “downs” and what you can take away from those experiences. I feel as though this is absolutely crucial to my life and I’m always working on finding a healthy balance between the light and dark (positive and negative) aspects of my life. And when I’m able to create beauty out of something hard or bad, it’s that much better.