HA! Got your attention...
I am falling in love but it isn’t how I thought it would be. It is peaceful and serene and happy and all the things that love should be...but it isn’t with a person. It is with my life.
I have always wanted something different than what I have. There was always something “out there” that was going to make me happy or content or feel loved.
The Pandemic has given me the ability to see that I love my life in its current form. Nothing else added. Just here in my home, living my best life. I have food, shelter, people I love and that love me back. I am surrounded by nature and beauty. I put myself in the way of beauty every single day. On purpose. I have come to need it, not just want it.
I am occupying moments that used to just fly by. Finding courage to say things that I could have never said before. I have been pushing and straining, like a race horse in a starting gate, for the whole of my life and now I just want to allow each moment to come and fully occupy it.
I want to lay in my backyard. I want to ride horses with my daughter. Or talk to my son for hours about dogs and their care. I want to see my parents as often as possible. I want to have friends over to just sit and talk and laugh. I want to be here, right now. Right here and nowhere else.
I am not sure this is the secret to life. But it is life’s secret. To want what you have. To be content in the moment. Each one. This life, right here. Right now. Peaceful abiding life.
Today I am laying sod in my backyard. As a former East Coast girl, my entire childhood was spent running around on summer evenings on yards of grass that we took for granted. We laid on the grass in our swimsuits. We ran over it through sprinklers. We slept on it in the heat of summer when the house was too hot inside. We played croquet on it. Practiced soccer. Had picnics on it. The yard was the outside living room of my childhood. Today I bring it to my home and make the introduction to my life...again.
It may sound weird to love sod or grass. But I do. I love the way it feels between my toes. I love the smell when freshly cut. I love the way it brings unity to a family on a summer evening when the world has slowed and there is nothing else to do but sit on it and count the stars above.
I love the verdant green and lushness it brings to a space that is hard with rock and wood. I love the memories I plan to make on its outdoor carpet. A foundational overlay of family life right in my own backyard.
Life is funny...when I started this blog I never imagined writing about sod or grass but now I can’t imagine not writing about it. This feeling of loving life in its most basic and fundamental elements pervasive and has my full attention.
"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains?
Nature remains, to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons - the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night."
Walt Whitman
