Winter Garden Serenity

Hello friends, although it may not feel like it by the banks of the Oconee currently, winter is here.  With the resurgence of Covid and the renewed emphasis on testing and vaccinations this season requires that we take things cautiously and with care. Stay healthy and well for the New Year. Take things perhaps a little more slowly. Don’t forget that on these shorter winter days serenity can come from simply gazing out on a beautiful landscape! Here’s a poem from 2017 included in “Interbeing,” when Cat Max was still teaching me his own lessons about mindful aging. Thanks, Gene.

 

Winter Garden Serenity

Our winter garden calls the old
to smile against fatigue and decline,
with Lenten roses lining paths
and a pruned crape myrtle awaiting spring.

The flooded Oconee runs cold and quick,
enough to help some of my ashes
join old friends fast passing, already celebrated
by yellow and rose witch-hazel blossoms

and a red-tufted woodpecker
playing with a yellow-bellied comrade
on an oak trunk looking into a cosmos
far beyond our limited dreams.

I take Peggy’s hand to refresh love
that few suspect among the aging
in a culture obsessed by iPhone passion.
Yet the gray stones of the serenity circle

know better. At their center,
a vault for cremains awaits loved cat Max
and the rest of us. so are the old
welcomed by our winter garden.