Stopping to see the flowers...

I caught a glimpse of our flower bed yesterday and realized it had been overrun by weeds. So this afternoon after work I put some oldies on the radio, my dog on a chain, and got to work. I had no clue how big a job it was going to be, but I am exhausted. It was fun though. I love getting dirty. It's like a mark of accomplishment. I remember when I was in Cross Country in high school and we would run through ditches and tramp through mud puddles five feet wide. Afterwards, we'd have mud sprayed up the backs of our legs onto our shirts even, and, we would always stop somewhere for lunch on the way home, the whole lot of us. I remember walking through the restaurant covered in mud, feeling like the biggest bad ass as everyone stared. It was great! Today's accomplishment felt a little different, though equally as great.

I can pinpoint to the exact moment when I became in control of my life. It was only slightly over a year ago. I was in my bathroom of all places. I had just woken up and was feeling my usual level of lowness. All my life I'd wished for things to be different, without even realizing it. I wanted myself to be different, where I lived to be different, how I dressed, how I acted, what I did. After I was married, I had this view of the perfect life. We would live in a beautiful little house, preferably in St. Augustine, with a front yard full of flowers that you could see when you looked out the window. (Straight out of Little Shop of Horrors, right?) I would work on my art full time, my husband his. And, everything until that day was just a means to that end. But that morning, for whatever reason, I looked up out of our bathroom window and I spotted a flower. It was high up in a tree in our neighbor's yard, far from the window. But, it was a flower. And it was outside my window. And, suddenly it hit me. I am living my perfect life! Right now! Maybe it's not exactly how I pictured it, but it turns out I do have flowers outside my window! I was so excited! It sounds like the smallest thing, but it really was this complete instantaneous shift in my thinking. And, suddenly I wasn't waiting for life to come to me. I realized it was already there, I just had to open my eyes to see it!

Since then, I have really appreciated all that I have, not that I didn't before, but now I look at it not just with thankfulness, but excitement. I also realized that day that I do have the power to make some things happen. Maybe I can't do my art full-time right now, but I can still do some pretty rad projects on the side. Maybe I can't have the house in St. Augustine, but I live pretty darn close, and can go whenever I want. And maybe I can't have the flower bushes exactly how I saw them in my mind, but my husband and I have made quite a beautiful bed in our front yard. And today tending it was just more of a reminder of the wonderful things I have in my life because I accept them as they are.



You can learn a lot of things from the flowers.