"A Love Letter to the Gardens We Choose"
The cage was never yours to keep.
Gardens need to feel wanted… just like us.
In them, we can be ourselves… no need to perform or pretend to fit a role that doesn’t suit us at all. It feels free and safe.
We are born into a world … into families … where love too often comes with strings attached. If you are sensitive, you feel that weight early: the pressure to perform, the silent ledger of expectations.
Miss the mark? Suddenly you are drowning in shame or guilt, convinced you are not enough, that you must do better, be better… as if love should ever be earned.
In the past, so many families longed for sons.
The firstborn was destined to step into his father’s shoes: heir to the farm, the land, the legacy. The second son might become a priest or a teacher… and that was called a privilege.
But a daughter? Well, let’s hope someone had mercy on her. She would be married off, shipped from her father’s property to her husband’s… never her own. And if not?
There was always the convent… if her family had money. For the rest? No veil, no vows, just a lifetime as a skivvy: scrubbing floors, serving the very nuns who were supposed to be “brides of Christ.”
Either way, women were once property… handed from one man to another, from father to husband, from church to convent… with no rights, no voice, just the weight of what was expected.
I don’t need to remind you that divorce wasn’t even legal in Ireland until the mid-1990s.
In East Germany, women did have more rights than their West German sisters… but not because the system was enlightened. The state wanted our labour, our hands in the factories and fields, our voices in the Party… flaws and all.
If you didn’t grow up behind the Iron Curtain like my mother’s generation, you’ll never truly grasp what it meant to live that reality. And you sure as hell don’t get to judge it.
Things were different then, but never as simple as outsiders like to pretend.
History has a way of repeating itself… unless we are willing to grow, to outgrow the cages we have inherited. Otherwise? We are just stuck, reliving the same old scripts.
I was lucky… I grew up in the in-between.
The first 12.5 years of my life were behind the Iron Curtain. Then, until I was 19, I lived in a unified Germany that never quite felt like home. So I spread my wings and flew once I could, exploring Europe, planting roots… especially in Ireland.
Sometimes I worry about us free spirits, those of us who have tasted the joy of roaming, of evolving like chickens meant for the open sky, not in a cage. (That reminds me of the cartoon Chicken Run… I can’t help but laugh!)
But here is the thing: once you have planted the seed of freedom, it is hard to go back.
“They tried to bury us… the systems, the expectations, the old ways… but they didn’t know we were seeds.”
~ Mexican Proverb
I won’t leave you astray.
All I want is for you to remember who you are, and what you have forgotten… and rediscover what you have always been capable of.
You are never as old as you feel… just as stuck as you let yourself be.
So get up off your arse. Move that body. Stretch those weary limbs and joints.
The soil isn’t waiting for permission… neither should you.
🌿 Tend Your Inner Garden 🌿
As you move through this week, I invite you to pause and ask yourself:
What “cage” have you outgrown… or are you still trying to leave behind?
Where in your life have you planted roots, and where do you still need to spread your wings?
How can you tend to your own “garden” while helping others discover theirs?
Remember: You are both the gardener and the garden.
The one who tends, and the one who dares to grow.
Tend to your roots.
Prune what no longer serves you… this is how you make space. Not for others’ demands, but for the wings you were told to clip.
Trust your boundaries.
They are the fences others tried to blur, the lines they called selfish when you finally said: This cage is not my home.
Bloom where you are.
Not out of duty, but out of love. Not for others, but for the you who is blooming… here, where the soil remembers your name.
Let tending be your defiance. A quiet no in a world that calls care control, that confuses love with clipping wings.
If this resonates, tell me: How are you tending to your garden this week?
Let’s grow…rooted in hope, unapologetic in bloom.
DD🌻
As you move through this week, ☘️ may your heart be light and your burdens few, and may your garden always bloom for you.
🌻 If this note brightened your day, you can: Buy me a sunflower.