This time of the year my mailbox fills with seed and plant catalogs. I love it! Even as a little girl, I loved to peruse magazines and catalogs with flower pictures. Now as an adult, companies actually invite me to buy their flowers! I can hardly put the catalogs away to do anything else around the house.
January is prime time for planning your garden, be it flower or vegetable. Plant nurseries, of course, make it their business to know this and to encourage this commendable activity of garden planning. Their catalogs arrive just as soon as your bank account hits reset after Christmas and the promise of Spring begins to dawn over the Northern Hemisphere.
Questions arise as I pour through the catalog pages: Do I want to attract pollinators with flowers: what can I do to add height to my front flower bed; would I prefer slicing cucumbers or pickling ones? These are important questions! The catalogs help me choose colors and varieties. A really good catalog gives me information regarding the zone and soil type in which each plant flourishes. I simply find the colors, tastes, textures and heights which I like, as well, as which will flourish in my area and viola my garden is…well, one step closer to reality.
What About Lasting Beauty?
Now, gardening is an important part of my life, but it isn’t the most important part. I love to nurture and tend budding beauty and fruitfulness in my garden, but I have other canvases to paint. What about my heart? Or, my interaction with my children, husband and friends? I want my life to be filled with beauty and fruitfulness; varied texture and shades of color fragrance and sweetness. Where do I go for the flowers in my soul?
I Need a Virtue Catalog!
That’s right! What I would love is a virtue catalog with all the virtues that one could nurture in one’s heart and life. It would be lovely! Patience–a hardy perennial, sending forth small but lovely sprays of lightly colored blooms. Courage–a freely reseeding annual, arises and blooms in a blaze of fiery red. Everyday I could open up my catalog, leaf through the pages, and choose one virtue to plant and tend that day.
I haven’t found one yet. Pondering on this , though, I came up with a few pre-existing options. First, there is Scripture: therein, I can find the full outline of the most beautiful garden and all the secrets to growing it successfully. Second, there are the lives of the men and women who have lived lives of virtue. Like a really good seed catalog, these stories include virtues that grow well in various life settings. Thirdly, there’s life in the Spirit.
Life in the Spirit
Life with the Spirit, continually in communion with Him and empowered with His grace. “He renews his mercies every morning (Lm 3:23).” If every morning I arise and invite Him to accompany me, then He will walk alongside me and give me the seed, aka, the grace, to plant in each individual circumstance which I encounter on the way. The Master Gardener will be walking with me, sowing and growing the most beautiful and most fruitful garden around me. This is the ultimate soul-garden catalog.
Recent Comments