Embrace Your Inner Moss Pt. 2

     Last week we started this discussion about gardening. The question I raised was:How hard should we work to change the  landscape around us to fit into the mold of what current opinion says is beautiful?

     I am in the minority I think. I really like the moss most other lawners and gardeners work so hard to get rid of.  I even think that in certain respects crab grass is kind of cool. Now I work hard at my gardens. I mow. I prune. I move things around. But I really do try to think out of the box when it comes to subduing the world around me.      

     You may remember how originally I planned to get rid of all this stuff: It looked really gangly and gross when I moved in. I fought with it and took up a whole day in March trying to make it leave our lawn. I am really glad it was stubborn enough to stick it out until spring. Had I succeeded I never would have seen the spring landscape I now enjoy so much from my coffee table under the shade trees. Come on admit it it’s quite a picture!

        I’ll admit I like the wild look. There’s something intrinsically godly about it. I’ll also admit I am too lazy or too busy to fight with the lawn to make it line up in straight rows. I don’t know but I’ve never met a garden that wanted to grow square. The world is round and everything I have ever planted seems to grow in a circle or a curve. It’s we humans that insist everything be stuck in a box!

     Have you ever noticed that the more you insist on boxing things in, the more you insist on everything coming out exactly as you planned, the less it does so?  Case in point: I bought dirt for my garden boxes. I even asked the “expert” at the counter how much I needed. He told me. I bought the amount he recommended. He lied!

     I filled my boxes and had enough dirt left to fill another garden. Now I was wrankled. A part of me wanted to call the guy tell him to come get his dirt and give me a refund. Another part told me I should move the dirt across the lawn and cover the grass clippings with it. The achy broken part of me won. The part that says “Embrace your inner moss” took over and I built this

     Muddy says it looks weird. Most of our neighbors are probably wondering what the heck I am building. But at the moment I was sick of fighting with the dirt so I decided to embrace what I had and make the best of it.

      Those of you who read my post regularly know by now that I am not really talking about moss or dirt or gardens at all. I’m talking about an attitude.

      Life often hands us what looks like junk…trash…or moss. The beautiful thing about life is we get to decide what to do with the junk/trash/moss we are handed. I’m not saying we should always keep it. But sometimes I think we have to find a way of living with our moss. We have to find a way of making our “moss” into a blessing. What can we pull out of it? What can we turn it into that will benefit?

     As I close I just want to remind you that sometimes those things we think our greatest bane can become our greatest blessings if we only choose to embrace them for what they can bring.

“what if Your blessings come through raindrops
What if Your healing comes through tears
And what if a thousand sleepless nights
Are what it takes to know You’re near
What if my greatest disappointments
Or the aching of this life
Is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can’t satisfy
And what if trials of this life
The rain, the storms, the hardest nights
Are Your mercies in disguise” (Laura Story, Blessings)