My Garden

A friend of mine recently shared her blog with me. On it I found beautiful pictures of her garden and neat treasures she has turned into decoration for her house. I stared at those pictures with envy, thinking, why can't I do that!! I mean, I have a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens and I watch HGTV!! But alas, my house remains boring and plain, I don't even have curtains in all my windows.

After I looked at my friend's pictures, I walked out to my front yard to look at my own attempt at gardening. Well, let me be honest. My sister and brother-in-law came over with a bunch of flowers and a fern one day and said, "We are planting these in your front yard to make your house look better!" I said, "Great!".

So now I sit and stare at what one could only call, remains, of my flowers. The last vestigages of my landscaping adventure. I wonder, what happened? What went wrong with my flowers? Then a nagging memory comes to mind. The memory where my brother-in-law said something about watering the flowers. Oh geez!!

They did so well at first, when it rained everyday. Now here we are in July and well no more rain just good ole Georgia heat. Hence, my dead flowers.

Whenever something like this occurs, I sit back and wonder if there is a lesson to be learned. Is there something I can glean from my flower venture for future growth. As with all life's experiences, I think the answer is yes.

The first thing I learned is that everyone has talents. And that to be most successful in life, we should work within the realm of those talents. Not to say we should never try something new. We should!! Trying new things keeps us alive and vibrant. This is where I realize that planting, landscaping, and maintaining plants is not within my area of talent. Therefore, it is harmful to green life everywhere for me to attempt doing so. But the point is, I tried something new.

Secondly, we should try to minimize the time we spend beating ourselves up for not being like someone else. Lord knows we all have our strengths and weaknesses. And that life has enough trials without adding the pressure of trying to be something or someone we are not. Instead, we should focus on our strengths and praise and rejoice in the strengths of others.

And the last, but most important thing that I learned from this planting venture is that I am not good at maintaining green life. I should avoid green things at all costs. It will only cause me stress in the future when I cannot maintain their..... green-ness.

So, instead of dwelling on this, I charge on into the future and toward the things that I do well like shopping, or talking on the phone, .... :)