My Blue Gardenia

The cards kept telling me to plant a garden. The planets aligned in such a way that the year before was one of great loss and instability. I was drowning really, pushing the water out from in front of my face as fast as my arms could move, kicking my legs and feet and pushing to the top, to the light, but getting no where. Plant a garden? I mean, I've considered it. I like the idea of it, but it wasn't a long-forgotten dream or anything. Yet every time my sister did my tarot reading, it came up....something about planting a garden. It took a while to finally break through that the garden was Deenie's.

I started the story years ago. A piece of it fell into my lap in conversation. There was something about her, about Deenie, that I knew. I saw myself in her, and later, I saw my mother, and my grandmother, and her mother. As I've gotten older, one thing that I understand better than ever is that I am not as "special" as I might have once thought. My experiences, insights, fears, dark thoughts, are not so unusual, and I am more like, and more connected to all of those women, to all women, than I realized.

But writing it all down means digging into earth that's been frozen over for decades, and it scared me. And allowing others to read it, in a zine, and now in a blog, well that really scares me. But Pema Chodron, from the 2 dollar book I got at Goodwill told me that to stay in my little bubble out of fear isn't keeping me safe, it's keeping me suffering. Living is getting out of that bubble and learning to stay open-hearted even when it's scary and everything falls apart and all the children laugh at you. And I can't forget the wise words of my dearest friend and mentor, poet Amy Sutton, writer of the fantastic Tabloids, "Just get your pansy ass in gear and do the damn writing."

So I've decided to abandon the fear and embrace the honesty, with whatever that brings. I'm bringing out the hoe, the garden rake, the shovels, and here I am, in my own kind of garden, in a zen garden, in Deenie's garden. And there's a lot of work to do.

She is connected to the cycles of life and the seasons. For her, life begins, grows, and dies. She nurtures creation through all those phases. She honors and respects both life and death, as they are really a part of the same continuum.

She is concerned with all growing things.

She is the quintessential mother.