When you don't even try

 Remember these beauties?

Well,

 they're dead.

[Don't ask me to talk about it, it's too painful.]

Only this scraggly mint has survived,

but in the words of my 'expert',

'mint can survive anything'.

Even me.

My hope has turned to discouraged indifference.  My mint will probably prove that expert wrong.

Now I sit on my deck in some kind of mournful watch, as if on the edge of the hospital bed, just waiting for the end.  

I usually bring a book.

Today, however, something caught my eye, sparkling in a forgotten corner.

This:

an empty pot, left for dead since last summer.

  Once the beauty inside of it had disappeared, I pushed the pot off to the side of the deck, and pretended it didn't exist.  

Too depressed to deal with it.

So, today, I sat next to it, and looked at it.  Really looked at it, for the first time in awhile.

You see, I'd been aware that the pot was changing, but only out of the corner of my eye.  I had put it into the category of 'avoid at all cost, it's too painful otherwise', and had blocked it from my real vision.

And today as I sat and stared into it, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it before.  

And then I realized:

How often in life we do the very same thing.

Push something out of the way, because we believe on some level that we have failed it, and can only avoid it from here on out, because the alternative is to either admit defeat or try again, and neither one feels possible. And, because we're terribly terribly afraid of what it is we'll find, if we were to look closely again.

 We stick it off to the side, and sit in a cloud of indecision regarding what to do with it.  We get so good at not dealing with it, we can't even let ourselves see that our lack of decision has become a decision anyway. 

And, in the meantime,
we miss what's growing before our very eyes:

Something far more interesting than anything we could ever have intended for ourselves.  

Looking into that pot, I realized that even when I wasn't trying, and even when I didn't think I deserved it or that I could accomplish it, something grew anyway.

And, it's neat.

That's grace.  When I didn't even try.

[P. S. Those of you waiting for birthday blogs,
they're on their way!!]