Bloom Where You Are

Spring is fast approaching and if you have a gardener’s spirit and are a lover of the soil, plans for your passion are forming in your mind. A single clump of lavender crocus          will delight you in an otherwise barren garden. What inspired me to write this in my blog today was a quote my daughter shared written on a teabag: A garden is a delight to the eye and solace for the soul. from contemporary British poet, Sadi Ranson.

This brought to mind another quote I saw on a wooden sign on my sister-in-law’s wall many years ago as we visited them during a snow storm/ blizzard in upstate NY in a small town in the middle of nowhere. She and her husband had four preschool children and moved there from Madison, NJ for his job. She explained the difficulty of relocating from an area with direct train access to NY City to a town without even a hospital or any medium size city nearby, plus adjusting to raising four young children after a career in nursing. (Her first job was researching the cases of the young women who worked painting the radium dials on watches, control panels of planes, etc  in the 1940’s, as they were later afflicted with horrendous debilitating affects of the radioactivity.)

The sign contained just four words: Bloom where you are. It said a great deal about her situation and also our own when we question our surroundings, our work, people in our lives, our vocation. It sounded biblical and Google gave me two passages. Corinthians 7:17-24 and Jeremiah 29:4-13. I will share with you Cor.7:24 Everyone should continue before God in the state in which he was called. Paul was speaking  t converts to Christianity; that they should maintain their former roles in life.

The second reference from the old testament given by God to Jeremiah was that the Jews exiled in Babylon should build houses, find husbands for their daughters, have children, etc. And God said: After seventy years I will send you back to Israel.

So the moral of the story for us today is: bloom where you are. And delight in your garden!