a patient reminder.

Patience is a virtue slowly grinding to dust impulse and taming wild irrational beats of heart and emotion. We hurry, rush to ends, often preferring what’s fast over lasting.  Houses dug into sand dependent on the tide rising and receding.  The poverty of rush is just that.  Lives always shifting.  Mine, a pace bent on sprinting, panting breath and often missing eyes.

Good things come to those who wait because they are slow, deliberate, intentional and patient with life.  They are constant in wait, protected in storm and growing through it all.  The rush of circumstance always in flux do not move them because circumstance is not what owns them.

I’ve written about it many times before, but for the sake of now, I remind myself again.  Wait is action, not static and stagnate.  To wait is to choose a response of pause or steady continue until the right time presents itself.

In each of my passing days, there lies a drive, partly panicked, to run back or rush ahead out of the moment into another.  I want to be somewhere else and have it all figured out, be more established and further down the road in life.  I always envision life to be better there.  It will never magically just be better there.

Life is real now.  And tomorrow is shaped today.

The imagery helping me to slow and trust and dig into today fully is my heart as a garden.  Leave a garden alone in neglect and weeds grow.  Overgrown, it sets unbalanced.  Growth and beauty stunted.  But tended to daily, it has all reasonable chance to flourish and give evidence of life.

The garden is beautiful because of cultivation.  Hands dirty and dig into the soil planting seeds and investing time giving cause for health both now and into tomorrow.

All good things come to those who actively wait now.

A garden is a grand teacher.It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust. Gertrude Jekyll