My Tiny Forest
Look at my beautiful, tiny forest! Full of big, beautiful yellow and purple flowers. Trees covered with morning dew. That stand tall and sparkle in the morning sunshine. In the afternoon when the wind blows, those trees lovingly share their hearts with the earth to create more and more big, yellow flowers.
I remember the year that I took one of my gardening hand tools to my yard. You know! The one that gets those MF-in’ dandelions out of the ground down to the core. I just spent 5 minutes googling to figure out the name of it. It’s called a weeder. Fitting
Yet this morning I sat on my sidewalk just observing these little guys. Breathing in the fresh, Kansas air and thinking about where my heart was then and where it is now. The plants served their purpose then and they are serving a purpose now.
In the summer of 2014, we had a damn-near dandelion-free yard. It was beautiful. It was the fruit of hard work. Digging up those little summbitches with the weeder combined with whatever chemical killer Drew used. We were successful. This was the summer that the company I worked for went through a software change. Holy Mother Wyatt Erp. The place has never been the same. I drank a lot of beer and cried a lot that summer. I ate chips and salsa for dinner as I sat in my home office drowning in emails up to my eyeballs and a wave of another crashed over the top of my head.
On the nice, sunny days, I took to the yard with my weeder. Sitting in my front yard, wearing my swimsuit because I didn’t GAF what anyone thought or who would drive by, I mindlessly dug up dandelions. It was therapeutic. It allowed me to see instant results of my hard work which was on the absolute other end of the spectrum from what I was experiencing at work. It was satisfying. It served me well.
Today. My heart is happy, loving and filled with joy. Curious. How does God view these little things? These things that His people have decided are a nuisance. My weird-self imagined little beings playing and jumping around in this forest and I smiled. I sprawled myself out on the sidewalk in our front yard to capture an artsy-fartsy picture while the neighbor lady grabbed something out of her truck in the driveway. I can only imagine what she thought! I couldn’t stop with just one picture because I saw beauty in so many things. In life. In God. In me. In the world.
Last week, we ran into Rick, the professional mower/yard keeper of the town, and asked him about these little suckers. Evidently there are here to stay for the season and he said to call him back on September 13th.
So for this year - I choose to see beauty. I choose to imagine. To be curious. I choose love. And in the fall, as the seasons change, we will gently and lovingly put the tiny forest to rest knowing that someday, it will probably return.
The life you create is based on how you choose to see it. What do you see?