Feeling Green

So it's colder outside and I'm lamenting the absence of gardening activity. The morning glory vine is truly sad looking, the impatients are leggy and everything is looking wintery. I love living in Texas which provides an actual changing of seasons even if it does go from 85 to 55 in the course of one hour. It's just hard to see the back yard go from lush to SKELETOR. Very sad.

What that means is all the plants come indoors. So in the course of coming through the front door to stepping into the living room you've already passed 5 plants and you can see at least four more. I choose to surround myself in green. This either means I have a green thumb or I truly can't stand to not garden...even if it does mean just keeping plants alive indoors. Sometimes, since I'm fanatical about it, I just sit and look at the way the sunlight hits an ivy at a certain time of the day. There is an obsession about keeping things alive. I'll cut the plants down and watch to see what they do with their new growth.

As I was cutting a couple of closet plants back today I felt great guilt. Here they are killing themselves to thrive and I'm hacking away. They look naked but I have to get all that old growth off. Surely they can't do well in this dry manmade heat with all of last year's growth. Sometimes we all have to start fresh and see where we can go...just see how far we can go with a new outlook. It may be a new job, a new promise to be healthy or a renewed passion for our spirituality. At first we look naked and vulnerable...all our shoots sticking out...not pretty

Today, in preparation for the new year...think about what needs to be cut down and given a fresh opportunity for growth.