I took this picture of our back yard during Holy Week last year. It seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that no place could be so touched with beauty, freshness, life, and consolation as this shady north corner, where the red camellias weep their discarded petals onto the violet-scattered grass. Then, it seemed to me to be a living icon of the garden where Jesus knelt to pray that the cup of death would pass from Him.
This year the camellias are dropping their blooms at the end of the first week of Lent -- and what iconic sense can I make of that? I'm not sure, except that of course we're headed in that same direction, from Eden to the garden of blood and tears.
At any rate, for much of the year my back yard is nothing to look at, but in this holy time it comes into its transitory own.
4 comments:
Very beautiful ... thank you!
Thanks, Willa. My yard doesn't ordinarily look very magical, but for a little window of time in the early spring, it does. I leave the grass unmown until all the violets and the little white starry flowers, whose name I don't know, are finished, so it's all a real meadow right now.
And the thing I love about this picture is that aside from the bench, which I put there, none of what you see is anything *I* did. It's all pure gift.
This makes me feel bad because on Saturday I mowed down all the little wild clover-ish flowers and spiderworts and stuff in hopes of giving the actual grass a better shot. They were pretty, too. I'm a brute.
Well, I mow mine eventually, and then I don't have grass, which I sort of regret . . .
Post a Comment