Happiness After Divorce

The first green shoots are up.

I was walking the other day when I paused by the patch of earth I’d turned over last spring—a small, stubborn plot beside my cabin, where I’d planted a few packets of seeds I’d bought on a whim. Why bother? I’d asked myself, watching the soil dry into cracks. After the divorce, I’d felt like a place that had been abandoned, overgrown with thorns. I couldn’t even keep a single houseplant alive for a month. Now, here I was, tending to nothing but dirt and memory.

But the seeds had chosen to grow. Not a single, dramatic bloom, but a cluster of tiny green spears pushing through the dark earth, barely visible. I knelt, my knees stiff in the damp morning air, and touched one with a fingertip. No one saw. No one needed to. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t need to prove anything.

That’s what mattered. It wasn’t the sprouts themselves—it was the quiet certainty that I’d done something. Not for someone else, not to fix a broken thing, but simply because I could. Because I was still capable of tending, of hoping, of watching the world renew itself without needing a witness.

Nature teaches us that growth isn’t always loud. It’s in the slow unfurling, the patient turning of soil, the way a single shoot finds its way toward light without a single word of encouragement. For the first time since the divorce, I didn’t feel like I was waiting for something to happen to me. I was part of the happening.

I sat there for a long time, just watching. The forest breathed around me, and for the first time in years, I breathed with it.

— Ellen Ferguson, patient as the land