Life is a garden

I hate the garden metaphor!  I don't want life to be a garden.  I wanted life to be a marble statue,  once you had actually finished the difficult and terrible work,  and cleaned up all that dusty mess,  it would stay,  perfect,  in shape and timeless for centuries.  I want a Michelangelo statue of life. 

But life is a garden.  Endlessly growing and changing. You plant something,  it thrives,  you are happy.  You plant exactly the same plant,  in a slightly shadier corner,  and it dies.  You clean it, it's gorgeous.  You go away for a weekend and it's full of debris and two new plants - are they weeds that need to be uprooted or are the new plants that will give joy and beauty? And who decides which?

I hate gardening.  To me it's endless work and repetition.  But I love having friends.  I don't find the tending of friendships endless work.  I don't find our conversations repetition.  So in some cases,  I can garden.  I can even look after my dog,  who is a source of such joy for me.  I don't enjoy the cleaning up after him,  but it's a small price that I am willing to pay. 

So life is a garden (sorry!)  But in this garden, you get to decide what you are going to plant,  which plants matter and how often you need to weed/clean.  While I love an elegant French garden,  I think I'm just going to settle in to my wild English garden and relax... 

Ephemeral Art

When I was much younger I came across an article about a group of people who made ephemeral art – art that took a day to make – perhaps patterns on the sand at a beach – and then was washed away,  like it had never been.  (a great current example is the work of Jim Denevan) 

At the time,  I was baffled.  Who would want to spend a day doing something spectacular and beautiful only to have it wash away?  This article was so old, it was before the internet; you couldn’t even get viral pictures of it! 

But I’m older now and I can see it as the perfect metaphor that it is – life is ephemeral art, we are here so briefly, and our task is to make something beautiful, even though it may not last, even though we may not finish it.  The doing matters as much as the completion.  Now there is something about ephemeral art that moves me to tears.    And of course now we have the internet, so we can share these images, let others see the beauty, and hold on to the ephemeral a little longer…