Stillness and Stir 🌿✨

"A garden’s reflection on grief, love, and presence"

“Where stillness meets the stir of life.” (photo by DD)

Gardens are as different as we are.

Some are noisy, restless, and can’t sit still. Others crave the peace and quiet of a retirement home… though even there, I dare say, quiet isn’t always guaranteed.

Trust me, I have done work experience in one. The spirit usually awakens when there is food and music, and I have seen that in every garden of life.

Life suddenly turns into a dance.

After spending the past month in a rather unstructured, slightly disorganized garden… where letting go and weeding were necessary… I not only learned a lot about myself, but also sat with my grief for my late mother.

It came out in waves… especially when I least expected it.

Beside me sat a woman… a mother to her daughter, a grandmother to her granddaughter… and a young twenty-year-old, just at the beginning of her life’s journey. I felt for both of them, including the weight of their unresolved emotions, but I knew those burdens weren’t mine to carry.

I knew I needed to tend to my own garden plot.

That explains my vigorous need to go for hikes out in nature, to let the wind blow through me... to remember who I am and what I came here for.

Gardens need tender loving care.

Presence is essential for those who feel lost or off-kilter in the world, figuring things or, looking for clarity and honesty, helping them find their footing, especially emotionally. To feel welcome is to feel at home, from within and without.

Grief is part of life, and it isn’t always easy.

“Grief is the price we pay for love.”

~ Queen Elizabeth II

Not everyone is willing to sit with it, to let it be.

Every day is a new beginning, and with every evening, we say goodbye to what was, making space for what hasn’t yet arrived.

Letting go is hard, especially when it feels like only yesterday that I sat at a client’s kitchen table, and my mum called me for the last time. I still hear her voice, her excitement as if she was a teenager – all giddy! She wanted to tell me something important, but in person. But by then, she was already gone.

Now, I am in someone’s house and garden close to the Wild Atlantic, caring for the place and their pets while they are away for the weekend. Grief lingers here, too. Someone has recently passed on, and the pets sense it.

One of the dogs is always on alert, hoping her master will return any moment now. She doesn’t understand yet, but he will always be with her, no matter where she roams in the backyard.

I feel her sorrow, her loss.

These rescue pets… three dogs and three cats… have found their forever home, but they need someone’s presence, someone who can sit still and simply be.

So here I am, in this garden close to the sea, surrounded by life that is both restless and still. The dogs’ slow pace, the cats lounge out in the sun, and the wind carries whispers of what was and what will be.

Maybe that is the magic of a garden… it holds space for all of it: the noise, the quiet, the grief, and the joy. And perhaps, in tending to it, we tend to ourselves.

🌿 Tend Your Inner Garden 🌿

As you move through this week, I invite you to pause and ask yourself:

• Are you the noisy, restless garden… always buzzing, always moving, or the one that craves peace and quiet, but still finds joy in the little bursts of life, like the cats pouncing or the dogs wagging their tails?

• Where in your life do you need to “sit still and just be,” like the pets here who have found their forever home?

• What does your “garden” look like when it is at its most alive… chaotic, serene, or a little of both?

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🌻

The Compassionate Gardener

As you move through this week, ☘️ may you have a heart full of love, and a garden full of peace.

🌻 If this note brightened your day, you can: Buy me a sunflower.