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. The Need For Approval
That’s what mattered. It wasn’t the sprouts themselves—it was the quiet certainty that I’d done something. Happiness In Simple Things 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. Starting Over I was part of the happening. Finding Yourself Again
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. The Gift Of Ordinary Days
— Ellen Ferguson, patient as the land