Honoring Darkness: And Thrive

Several hours of serious maybe-life-changing medical waiting rooms yesterday.  Caretaking Beloved, knowing to bring READING.  More than ubiquitous phone reading, needed 'easy thriving profound deep with truths of the ages that settles the heart though topics at times unsettling' type reading.  Ask for anything less?
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Brought one of my journals, and the new testament.  Target hit, an arrow from the journal pierced through making me forget the real-time drama.  Mind to gather resources, from old realms with new perceptions.  Toss in a random reading from Luke and exceeded my mission statement.
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Seriously, who goes to a hospital waiting room without a mission statement?  Sensing how effectively all of life is a Garden Design?  What was the first thing God did for us?  Designed our garden.
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Darkness.  When did we lose 'darkness' as a good word?
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"...darkness --like silence, like solitude--belongs to that class of blessings increasingly endangered in modern life yet vitally necessary to the human spirit."  Maria Popova.
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"For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars -- pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time."  Henry Beston.
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"We live our life in various realms of meaning which do not quite cohere rationally.  Our meanings are surrounded by a penumbra of mystery, which is not penetrated by reason."  Reinhold Niebuhr. 


Pic, above, here.
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Realizing, in my journal yesterday, agrarian Garden Design is good Garden Design for living the night sky, as part of your life.  Certainly, it's been part of mine, though never consciously intuited.
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"Awe enables us to sense in small things the beginnings of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common & simple."  Joshua Heschel Abraham.
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Gardening is walking the talk of thinking.  What should your garden aspire to?  The best within you.*
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This photographer, Matt Albiani, below, gets it about light.  More than shooting the light, or merely another bathroom, shooting light coming from space, thru the garden, and finally onto the bathroom wall.  Albiani shot the eternal, giver of life, light.

 
Pic, above, here.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Just ahead of the gloaming, below.  Painterly shot.  So much action in the stillness.
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"Design at its core, thrives when a human being cares enough to do work that touches another --- it doesn't thrive when it gets more efficient."  Seth Godin.

 
Pic, above, here.
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More than sleep, darkness keeps us healthy in myriad other ways.
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"We have come a long road up from the darkness, and it well may be --- so brief, even so, is the human story --- that viewed in the light of history, we are still uncouth barbarians.  We are potential love animals, wrenching and floundering in our larval envelopes, trying to fling off the bestial past.  Like children or savages, we have delighted ourselves with techniques.  We have thought they alone might free us.  (But) once launched on this road, there is no retreat.  The whirlpool can be conquered, but only by placing it in proper perspective.  As it grows, we must learn to cultivate that which must never be permitted to enter the maelstrom --- ourselves."  Lauren Eiseley.
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Here, in our ca. 1900 home, it is past time to put in the Moon Garden.  To honor darkness.  Gravel, a stone fire ring, chairs, sky, trees, meadow, garden, woodland.
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A life wants to live in me.  My garden lets it grow.  As my garden spoke, it taught my soul to speak.*
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Honor the darkness in your garden.  I have, but didn't know.  Until yesterday & now must have darkness more fully. 
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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Neo-sentence via Parker Palmer, spliced with garden.....