This morning I looked out my office window and saw shoots coming up through the soil. Bulbs I planted years ago, finally waking up.
It took years the first time. I remember how long I waited, and how it felt the morning they finally bloomed — like something I’d almost forgotten had decided, on its own timing, that today was the day.
These particular bulbs came from a friend — someone we loved dearly, part of our local car club, which is like a big family. She gave us the bulbs herself, years ago — the same ones blooming outside my office window this morning, and outside my front window too.
I mentioned to my husband everything I’d been contemplating throughout the week — jotting notes in my journal about grafting, root stock, seasons, the rotted oak stump of a three-hundred-year-old oak, still giving back. That’s when the conversation turned to the pink lilies from our friend — the ones we’ve always called naked ladies, which is what we learned when she first gave us the bulbs. They shoot up out of bare ground in late summer with no leaves at all, blooms seeming to appear out of dry soil overnight — which is exactly where that name comes from. Later, curious what was underneath it, I looked further and found another name for them: Belladonna lilies. Italian for “beautiful lady.” I fell in love with it — the same root as una bella vita, a beautiful life.
He looked up. “There’s one ready to bloom,” he said, “outside the front window” — a bud, still tightly closed. By the next morning, it had opened completely.
In that same conversation, he told me the club was making a donation in her honor to the Cancer Society.
Everything, naturally, coming full circle. Without either of us arranging it. Without either of us even discussing it.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. We never once saw her own garden — the one she tended to with pride and joy, one of her many passions. We never walked through it. We never got to witness that part of her firsthand.
And yet we knew her heart completely.
Not because she showed us her garden. Because she gave pieces of it away — to us, to others, to anyone who wanted bulbs in their own yard. She didn’t keep the best of herself for herself. She handed it out, one gift at a time, and let it grow in gardens she’d never see.
There are holes in our hearts where she used to be. And there are blooms in our yard, this morning, that wouldn’t exist without her. Both are true. Neither cancels the other out.
What you leave behind is tied to what you focus on giving today.
Long before the roses, the lilies, the trees the birds left for you without asking — you were already planted. Not after your arrival. Before it. And at the very moment of your arrival, a seed was chosen, just as precious and one of a kind as your own fingerprints — for a garden only you could tend, meant to bear fruit only you could bear. Nothing ordinary about it. Then or now.
Certain things in nature cause me to pause — a bloom, a bird, an old tree still standing. I sense they’ve caused you to pause too. Not just admiring it. Recognizing it. It’s a reflection of your own heart, showing you what’s already in process — what it’s already preparing to do: make this place more beautiful while you’re here, and leave it more beautiful once you’re not.
So here’s what I’m sitting with, and maybe you will too.
What have you been gifted with, in this life, that deserves your care and your attention? Where are you yearning to spend more time — not only for what it gives you, but for what it might give others while you’re here, and what it will leave behind once you’re gone?
Get your hands in the dirt — your own garden, or simply the garden of life. Take what’s strong. Take what’s even broken — a jade plant shattered into pieces — and give it a new pot, a new life. Give it away, if that’s what it needs. This is true service, which is the greatest expression of love — a beautiful way to allow fear to melt away. Put nurture into nature, and nature nurtures you back — and everyone around you. It really does all come full circle into one beautiful picture.
This is real success. Living true to the beat of your beautiful heart. Something that lasts — in life, in business, in love.
Everything you touch. Every friend, every family member, everyone you are yet to meet — you tend to them all as closely as your own garden. That beauty doesn’t end with you. It gets passed down — and it lives on, long after you’re gone.
Another great read! Thank you! I love this and love you!