“I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”F. Scott Fitzgerald, spoken by Daisy in The Great Gatsby
Did you ever want a Doctor’s Kit set for Xmas and receive a nurse kit instead? In the war between your brains and your looks did you ever lose a battle? The whole war? Did you ever feel suddenly isolated, like the kid in the bubble? Are you losing your ability to hear and be heard through the thick glass walls of your bubble? Has your ability to hear become as compromised your ability to rebound when life hits back, really hard?
Then, this post has come a long way for you, baby.
I love to garden, to get dirt beneath my fingernails, to wipe sweat from my forehead as I rest in the shade, and look up, and see sudden beauty that I made with my own hands. Ok, me and mother nature, but still. Those are times when I can see the here and now, when I really stop racing into the future. A moment of the most wonderful exhalation of tension, frustration, pain. In my garden, I feel like who I am, not who I’m masquerading as the rest of my days.
Here, I live and breathe. And most importantly, that real deep part of me is intact, safe and not threatened. I don’t have to run to try to keep ahead of the anger that breathes down neck and makes me hunch my shoulders in pain. I don’t shoulder the weight of the world out back, just my own lightweight little foolish self.It’s only here, in the backyard summer afternoon heat, creating beauty that I enjoy and relish in, that I meet my self coming and going. I’ve become Daisy’s happy fool. My garden is, finally, the best place a girl can be in this world.
