Stories From the Farm

My garden, this little farm, it helped save me. Going outside, sun on my face, hands in the dirt, thoughts of the future, of flowers, it was healing. Gardening is inherently hopeful. If the fire sent me into a cocoon, planting those sunflowers was what started to help me break out of it, the genesis of Iron Butterfly. There was a ray of sunlight through the darkness.

I reflected on the following words from CS Lewis that day:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. … There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. -CS Lewis, A Grief Observed.

This is exactly how I felt. In shock, moving through the world as if underwater. Before heading outside to the garden I jotted down some thoughts:

Laura was the best of us. Her soul glowed.

As Anthony Doer pointed out in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, we call color visible light, and “mathematically, all of light is invisible”. I’m going to believe that although I cannot see Laura anymore, and I cannot see the light inside her, I am going to believe that she is part of the light surrounding me, and nourishing these tiny plants, and continuing to make the world beautiful.