Little Pockets of Beauty

I really appreciate a beautiful garden.  I love checking out books on gardening from the library and reading them on my couch, while my yard goes neglected.  As an army brat, I never learned and really don’t know the first thing about where you even start when you want to create beauty in the yard.

That’s all changing.  In fact, I now understand that it’s not about creating beauty, it’s about revealing the beauty that’s already there.  I owe this new found wisdom to, Shar, my gardening mentor/tutor/teacher.

I’ve long wanted to play with someone outside, someone who could teach me, but wasn’t really uptight about how things should be.

How do you find someone like that?  How does a grown woman ask another grown up, “Wanna come over and play in my yard?”

That’s just what I did.  And, Shar said, “yes.”

One of the things I’ve learned from her so far is how easy it is to create little pockets of beauty by “eliminating the negative.”  For example, I live in the woods, lots of shade and lots of tree debris.  Recently, Shar and I were playing in the yard and she was delighted to find a stump that I’d thought was an unsightly mess.  After cleaning away the debris in the stump, we filled it with some dirt, added some moss from another part of the yard, a few rocks and VOILA!  A little pocket of beauty.

Where are there hidden pockets of beauty in your life?  What might you eliminate to add to the beauty of your life?  Perhaps there are old habits, ways of being or thinking that you could eliminate.  Perhaps there are virtues you could cultivate.  Or maybe a little pocket of beauty could be revealed by your cleaning and rearranging a shelf or a cabinet or your state of mind.

Post a comment and share your little pockets of insight and beauty below.

This was originally post August 24, 2010