My friends and family groan whenever I trot out another analogy, but this one presented itself to me quite simply. For years I lived near my grandmother-in-law, who had a nice old house on a lake. I loved to learn from people, especially older people, and she had many things to share. She was getting on in her years and they had finally taken away her driver's license. Her days were spent puttering around the house and in her garden. When I went to visit her, I had to listen while she went on in detail about her garden and all the things she was doing and going to do with it. You could definitely see that she was bringing peace and order to that little spot of land. All around for three acres things were growing wild, but right here in this one designated place, things were just the way she wanted it.
Then, as happens to all of us, she got too old and feeble to do the gardening, and the weeds came in. Finally she passed on and the house was vacant for years, waiting for the next property owner to come tear it down and create his own version of peace and order.
The strange thing was, that for a couple of years I would walk my dogs down to that vacant house and just look at the garden and remember what it had been. Nature has it's own beauty but it wasn't here in the garden. It needed it's gardener and she was gone.
We took some of her plants and put them in our garden where we tend them now. I see that the peace and order is actually inside us and the beauty of the garden is that outward sign of it. Sometimes I wonder if all of our life is an attempt to bring order to chaos, even knowing that we only do it for a while.
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