All summer I’ve been meditating on the dead cedar at the side of the yard. I never meant to; I meditate with my eyes open, and out on the porch bench, it was simply the spot my eyes fell when I relaxed them into my morning stillness practice.
When I realized the cedar was dead, I allowed it to inform my stillness, taking it in as an exercise in acceptance. The tree started to speak to me in that quiet way that trees talk.
Sometimes things just die, the tree said. There is nothing to be done. It is the way of things.
It unclenched my heart, heavy sometimes with my own little deaths—the failure of my marriage, my complicated relationship with my first daughter.
It’s all mixed together, the tree said. You can’t have it another way. To reject the death part is to reject the life part too.
When I went inside, I picked up a book about a garden a friend recommended, and in its pages, I found this:
Gardens, however disasterous, are beneficent. The return of the
seasons allows us to try again. Again and again—there is no end.
What failed last summer can be attempted in the next. Even as
the flower dies, it is preparing for revival in the spring.