Cultivated Here

Please play the music that is as much a part of the story as the paragraphs below. 🙂

I hung an old sign that I made in another time and another place. It caught up with me here on N 3rd in a box of things when someone sat it on my front porch; some random remnants of another home and another life.

A new life takes time in its developing and transition can waylay you back into the dirt or worse. A garden seed germinates and sends up a tender new sprout, tiny yet voluptuous-ful of energy and design…it is going somewhere to be something; up and into a plant-body, a vine, a tree, a weed, a flower, a bush that burns.

In my old life I had a garden and I set a pole nearby for whimsy and direction. I hung signs on my pole so I wouldn’t forget to do the things I should do, like look up.

I am not very crafty but I know how to spell and think and paint on pieces of wood, so I made another sign to remind me to do what I love to do.

I hung a sign to remind myself where I want to plant and what I want to harvest someday.

I loved the pole with the signs. I crowned it with a birdhouse and a bluebird made a nest, laid some eggs and filled my garden with bird songs and baby beaks peering out one spring.

I started making signs for inside, too, so my feeble mind would keep going, staying on the sweet track home. That place where your heart can rest.

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On my back porch a sign read, “Thinking Spot”, so I would not forget to coast a bit and let my mind wander around for awhile. I hung a sign in the front lawn declaring my love of home and I had it made of metal and sealed it in black. It read Four Oaks Farm.

But if in life your first plans come to a screeching halt and you must start things again, that new life needs energy and design to be something and go somewhere. And I propose that it needs signs to keep the feeble mind on the sweet track home. I needed signs.

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At first my signs hung in town on 3rd before a backdrop of tan, like the desert-wilderness-walls of the people heading for a promised land, but were still very sad and very stuck in the sands of the interim, the in-between where hope dies with the bodies of the unbelieving. Or finds its way and blooms into colors.

Hope can look like the sorry little dandy lion that has pulled it’s hungry body up from a crack in the pavement and pushed out a yellow bloom with its last and final breath, yet it lives. My hope was like this. It cried and hid and was angry and sad and hopeful. Hope finds a way when tethered to that Other Land, that Better Land. It didn’t come soon, but one day the back drop for my signs changed colors. Maybe I peered into Canaan and saw yellows, greens, blues and golds. Maybe a new life was there.

I went out on a Sunday morning… this Sunday morning, and hung up my old signs that had been pried off the pole crowned with a blue bird nest. I washed the dirt off of them. They are dingy and old, but their delight is still compelling me, their words still mean so much to me.

I set the old metal post and slid the metal farm sign into its slots behind my little tomato patch, my first garden on 3rd. You have to look close to see the words until I spray it black once again. But it says Four Oaks.

Now Hinterhaus has a garden called Four Oaks and I like this very much.

Now the last sign I wanted to hang was so worn that I could barely read it. Life’s transition had taken the biggest toll on it and it was in danger of being lost. I took it upstairs to see if I could read it and fill in the lost letters and words.

It hinted of the new sprout that is going somewhere (up from the ground) to be something (we shall yet see). I thought of the ready soil on the farm because I had just hung up that sign. “Joy Sprouts in Ready Soil”, I had painted on wood to remind myself.

It’s not the prettiest sign, but I’ll hang it back up now as my favorite of all to remind me of where I’m still going and what I will yet be.