Oh I miss the garden of spring, bright green and fairly juicy with surging life, growth visible almost hourly. 

The garden of summer, strong, tall, spreading and proud established its rightful territory hosting parties for butterflies and bumblebees while birds swooped and circled overhead for entertainment. 

Comes fall and the autumn colors dazzle and your head spins with the abundance and fruitfulness: ripe maturity and the reward of the work of your hands.  You  gather and enjoy as quickly as you can, more than you’d hoped or dreamed for, more than enough.  What will you do with the excess?  The garden, only months earlier bare soil, became a hypnotic haven overgrown with delicious joy and frolic, intoxicating verdancy, flourishing symbiosis and riotous vitality.

Winter.

Winter.  The winds have blown away the brown crispiness from branches no longer green in a purifying poof.  And just like that - bare, faded, stark and desolate woody shrubs etch their way across the landscape looking for all the world like death in this blustery cold.  I am forced inside where I stand at the window wondering why.  What has happened in the Magic Kingdom?

The snow covers it all.  The snow keeps falling and floating across the Magic garden Kingdom, and has settled decidedly upon each branch and every surface, carefully tucking itself around all shrubs and trees, blanketing the the 4′ x 4′ squares where vegetables once grew abundantly.  There is quiescent hush there now where once the sound of the spade dug deep into earth, the fountains bubbled exuberantly and night fires blazed; children laughed and ran around while little weeds were uprooted and branches were pruned and sugar snap peas were hungrily crunched upon right then and there in the verdant Kingdom.

Covering.

But the snow covers all now and despite my sadness at the loss of earlier, greener days,  the snow serves its true purpose hiding the ground, preventing the heat generated by the earth from escaping.  This blanket of crystal white inhibits the radiant life energy from abandoning the roots of the trees and bushes and plants and they are graced with warmth and protection (often 40-degrees warmer) in the dark, deep soil of winter, regardless of what happens in the visible.  Did you know roots have a life-pulse that continues through even the most frigid conditions?  When the branches above have been frozen in their tracks by sub-zero temperatures, the roots are active and ready to spring into action at any moment, growing and spreading further and deeper even during the resting phase of winter.  The snow covering is grace.  The snow is mercy.  The snow is a safeguard, a secure shelter for the deepest, most important, most delicate and valuable resources and treasures.

The snow covers it all.  It unifies the the browns and grays and wheat-golds of the deciduous stand-bys.  For this season, this cold and sometimes hope-dwindling time of year, the snow creates a formal gown of beauty for ashes, of gladness for mourning and becomes a garment of praise instead of despair (Is. 61.3).  Sandy-the-Dog runs into the white, kicking up the flakes like dust and hundreds of birds fill the air in shock from where they’d been feasting on berries, but soon realize how harmless she  is and go back to stake their claim.  I laugh at the sight.  Life goes on.  In winter white.

He gives beauty for ashes
Strength for fear
Gladness for mourning
Peace for despair

When sorrow seems to surround you
When suffering hangs heavy over your head
Know that tomorrow brings
Wholeness and healing
God knows your need
Just believe what He said

He gives beauty for ashes
Strength for fear
Gladness for mourning
Peace for despair

Crystal Lewis, Beauty for Ashes

Hidden under a canopy of mercy on a melancholy winter’s day…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF:  Spring will come again.  My roots will be more established, stronger.  Have mercy on me, Lord, have mercy…

pictured: The Magic Kingdom (aka my backyard) in September; and now.