I Won't Always Be Here

Stephen Jenkinson asks, “Until your ability to see the flower is rooted in the fact that it won’t always be there, and neither will you, how much of the flower do you see?”

I hadn't gotten around to posting this photo of dinner the other night, a dinner where all but the almonds came straight from our garden to the stove to the table:

I remember thinking about how common and boring pictures of food can be. Maybe that's why I never made the effort to post the photo of dinner or the photo of just a few of the green beans I picked last weekend.

We had great vegetable gardens this year. Our soil was happy, and our plants were healthy. Until...

 Swiss Chard

...yesterday afternoon, a scary, windy, rainy, haily storm came through and pretty much annihilated the vegetable gardens, and stripped many trees of their foliage. Now, eighteen hours later, hail and strewn leaves still cover our yard.

Kale

If it hadn't been a hailstorm, it would have been frost or something. All things must end. Or continue on in another form. Or...

Every summer, I carry with me the fact that the plants in our garden are impermanent, that they will wear out by autumn, but I don't entertain the possibility that they could all be gone in some unsuspected moment, long before the first frost. I live that way in other areas of my life, too, thinking that everyone I love, including me, will naturally die in old age; there is always lots of time before I need to look at an ending. I put off living with the fact of impermanence until autumn approaches, until someone is in her 90s, until...

I won't always be here. I won't always be here. I won't always be here. This culture does not prepare us for, does not educate us in, that truth. Nature is offering it up to us all the time. I am trying to remember to listen.