I love surprises. For the most part. There is always a slight fear of not knowing what is about to come around the bend and sometimes that is a good thing and other times not. Roller coaster rides for instance, give me the kind of fear of which I’m not a fan. I’ll go on them, but it’s not going to be my idea to get in line again. On the other hand, when I was pregnant with my first child, I really wanted to wait to find out the sex of the baby and I have zero regrets because that was the biggest and most joyful type of surprise. No, the nursery wasn’t painted and yes all of the baby clothes were yellows and greens but I loved it. I found out the sex of one of my next two but kept the last one a secret again. It was the ultimate example of icing on the cake.
Enjoying a good surprise is letting go of the need to be in control.
When the freeze of the century happened in February, we did not know what in the world to expect out of our gardens and landscape plants. It has been so fun to see what we thought were goners, begin to show buds of life, like it’s April! We lost some beautiful old oak trees but just saw new life out of a stump of agaves we thought were toast, just last week. I have bluebonnets still popping up in the wettest areas of our home yard. The historic low temperatures were out of our control and so was knowing what was going to survive and what was lost. We had low expectations and with that came lots of surprise gifts. My shasta daisies were certainly not expected to return after such a deep and prolonged freeze but what a delight to see them bursting with pride, after all the rains. Healing rains.
Maybe nature is on to something. Unpredictability is sometimes a great stabilizer. Give it up to the powers that be and watch the earth unfold. <3
