The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. –Marcel Proust
I genuinely enjoy yard work. It’s a good work out. I like being outside. I have a strange predilection for getting dirty. I love flowers and listening to birds singing and bugs chirping. The smell of grass is one of my all time favorite aromas. Unfortunately I’ve had VERY little time available for getting outside and keeping up on my yard. Not to mention it’s been too hot to stay outside for any worthwhile period of time.
Our yard is starting to look pretty atrocious. The lawn is obtaining ugly brown spots and the lawn weeds are beginning to take over (we didn’t use Scott’s this year for money saving reasons… bad idea). My flower beds look pretty awful. The lilac bush is in desperate need of trimming as the lilacs have bloomed, died, and are now just sitting there all browned and purposeless. I need to cut the heads of the dead roses. The living flowers need some food. Oh, and the stupid weedy bushes that pop up like the moles in that wacka mole game… dig one out another appears elsewhere, well their getting big again and need to go NOW.
Seemingly unrelated but there’s a connection: As I was driving around today I was taking note of all the wild flowers alongside the roadways and filling fields. They’re tremendously large and abundant at present. I hadn’t really noticed them before today but they’re all over the place and they’re incredibly beautiful. I’m certain I saw several that were taller than me. They were definitely taller than the corn stalks in the neighboring fields. There were lacy white ones with large round heads. Tiny lilac colored ones in that classic flower shape… you know the one with the circle of petals that we all draw whenever we draw a flower. There were small yellow ones and pinky purple ones. They were absolutely filling fields. They were growing up over mailboxes, in rows in front of cattails, pretty much anywhere someone hadn’t mowed. I just kept looking at them and noticing them and enjoying them.
Funny thing though, if any of those “flowers” had been in my yard they’d be considered weeds. In the wild they’re so beautiful but in our controlled spaces, the ones we OWN, the ones we HAVE, they’re just something that gets in the way and needs to be taken care of. I guess I just have to laugh at the efforts we make to control our yards. I know it would look awful if I didn’t maintain it. If I had wild flowers growing taller than me in my front yard the city would probably fine us. The funny thing is just that nature unfettered and left to its own devices usually ends up being breathtaking.
And now I need to find time to clean up my mess outside.
Better is one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind. Ecc 4:6
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