Living-Deliberately.com

My jungle babies and I rode a funky wave yesterday. I’ve learned that sometimes, “sucking the marrow” means feeling the low parts of life intently too…not just covering over them. And how.

A day of jamma-wearin’, TV Watchin’, junk food eatin’, moping around is sometimes called for…like it or not. Feel it to it’s fullest, then take a shower and get over it.

I let them outside yesterday for the first time. I mean, without myself or an organized activity for the first time since we moved here. It was thier “shower”. An hour’s free play in the bushes behind the car…a seeming wilderness to explore though there are buildings just through the hedge not 100 feet away. Ideas and imagination and exploring refreshed them like nothing else could. A little time in the adult-free child world. A fort. A trail. A make believe camp site.

They came in new children. Like flower heads lifting up after a summer rain, vibrant and happy. Andrew sat down at the table and within two hours, went from stick people to full fledged bodies, with porportions and details. He asked for an art lesson and instruction. It was as if his little mind just went into a hyperdrive of ideas and inspiration. He was utterly compelled to create.

It’s how children grow. I knew this, I believe in this. They need room; not just physical space, but mental space. Room to dream, imagine, experiment. They come back to learning, come back FROM learning. It’s not so different than my need yesterday. We’re all just people of different sizes and sometimes our needs are amazingly similar.

I spoke with an old neighbor yesterday as well. It was part of my “shower”. I needed to hear what I didn’t want to hear…what did my garden look like. Never a showcase, it was my labor of love. I knew the family buying the house didn’t care much about it but I didn’t think they despised it. Had I known that, I would have found time and energy to transplant each one.

She says they are “allergic” to fresh things. So they’ve ripped out each plant and trashed it. The beds, with thier dark, rich soil that I’d built up, are gone. The heirloom veggies, the berries, the flowers, the herbs…all gone. They have plans to rip out the trees: the pines, the magnolia, the little apples I’d just put in this spring.

One can hope they run out of money for the carnage.

It’s thiers. Not mine. And yet….mine. My sweat. I created most of that garden while I grew a baby. My little fat baby is as much my “garden”. Today he’s in a sweet, soft cloth diaper. The paper imitation sits on the shelf. Something about thick cotton makes me feel a grounding deep within. Like I’ve hit some kind of “reality” beyond the temporal of our daily lives. I get the same tingle with dirt. There is an essense, a simplicity in my hands, that transcends time and plastic.

I come away with something that can’t be torn down. Children are eternal. How I grow them matters.

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