adventures in family & faith
View this post on Instagram Lessons from the garden: Document the Dead Stuff Moving into this house was hard on me. It was exactly what we needed (there’s a whole blog post on that crazy story), but it wasn’t a house I’d pick. The yard was barren & littered with broken glass, tin can lids, rocks & dead plants. Our last yard was gorgeous, with towering trees & a tire swing. This wasteland felt like the death of dreams. This spot is between the house & the garage, in front of the water heater. Along with bare dirt, it had the rotting stump of a once-might tree. The whole thing was sad & overwhelming. I didn’t think anything would ever grow there, so I started piling up rocks as I gathered them from around the yard. My rock garden began to take shape around the stump. And then one day I noticed some little weed growing out of one of the rocks. On a whim, I let the kids plan a couple pieces from our potted succulents. Little by little, things grew. And I have no pictures to show what it came from. I didn’t want to record emptiness. I didn’t want to remember ugly things. I wish I had. I wish I could look back at that dead stump & remember that feeling of utter desolation contrasted with this abundance. Memorials aren’t just for good things. Sometimes we need to plant our flags in places of despair & desperation. We need to mark those dark places so that when we reach them again (& again & again), we can point back to other black points, to dark nights of the soul, and tangibly see what we’ve survived. How far we’ve come. The lessons that have shaped our characters. Document the dead stuff. It become the fertilizer of new life. A post shared by Jenny Kaczorowski (@jennykaczorowski) on May 29, 2019 at 6:32pm PDT
Lessons from the garden: Document the Dead Stuff Moving into this house was hard on me. It was exactly what we needed (there’s a whole blog post on that crazy story), but it wasn’t a house I’d pick. The yard was barren & littered with broken glass, tin can lids, rocks & dead plants. Our last yard was gorgeous, with towering trees & a tire swing. This wasteland felt like the death of dreams. This spot is between the house & the garage, in front of the water heater. Along with bare dirt, it had the rotting stump of a once-might tree. The whole thing was sad & overwhelming. I didn’t think anything would ever grow there, so I started piling up rocks as I gathered them from around the yard. My rock garden began to take shape around the stump. And then one day I noticed some little weed growing out of one of the rocks. On a whim, I let the kids plan a couple pieces from our potted succulents. Little by little, things grew. And I have no pictures to show what it came from. I didn’t want to record emptiness. I didn’t want to remember ugly things. I wish I had. I wish I could look back at that dead stump & remember that feeling of utter desolation contrasted with this abundance. Memorials aren’t just for good things. Sometimes we need to plant our flags in places of despair & desperation. We need to mark those dark places so that when we reach them again (& again & again), we can point back to other black points, to dark nights of the soul, and tangibly see what we’ve survived. How far we’ve come. The lessons that have shaped our characters. Document the dead stuff. It become the fertilizer of new life.
A post shared by Jenny Kaczorowski (@jennykaczorowski) on May 29, 2019 at 6:32pm PDT
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