That’s the title of a book, later a movie, which I’ve neither seen nor read. It’s just a phrase I’ve heard since I was young, mentioned years apart by different people in different contexts, no import attached. Yet it has always hung in my mind.
The phrase resonates loudly on days like last Friday — the first full day of spring — when the temperature was 15 degrees and falling, with wind driving icy flecks against my face, and the snowpack like steel beneath my feet. In such moments I always ask myself, “Why don’t you leave?”
The same answer always comes back: “Because I can’t.” Which always leads to the question, “Why?”
Today, at last, I shoved aside the usual excuses involving money and commitment and came to the true answer: “Because I love it here.” Not just here, my homestead, but here, the four-season north. Although I dread winter’s merciless clench upon the land and count the minutes until it passes, I still love it, even require it, because without it there would be no spring. No summer. No fall.
Winter embodies the truisms that there’s no light without darkness, no pleasure without pain, no birth without death, no hope without despair. Wnter also brings its own beauty — a glimpse of heaven, perhaps? — in its smooth whites, sparkling glints of silver, soothing lavender shadows, dazzling blue skies, over the muted grays, greens, browns, and ochers of dormant life
Winter fills me with gratitude as I huddle safe and warm indoors, aching in compassion for the creatures stuck outside in its hardship. I can’t imagine how they survive, so their creative adaptability and endurance fills me with wonder. And during all the long months of waiting, I am kept charged by hope, because I know that no matter what happens, no matter how long it takes, spring WILL come.
This faith is what opened my heart to gardens. Plants embody the life force in their cycle of birth, growth, decay, and renewal, coloring and feeding the world as they grow. Despite all the obstacles flung at them by man and nature, they come back and flourish. They fulfill hope.
In the course of writing “Open Your Heart with Gardens,” I asked many people to express why they gardened, and received many different answers. Underlying all, I noticed, was the same reverence I feel during winter. I don’t feel it during the warm seasons because I’m too busy experiencing life to reflect upon it as deeply as I do during winter. So it’s only now, on the cusp between winter and spring, that I understand what “love in a cold climate” really means.
Carolyn Haley
Author: “Open Your Heart with Gardens”
3/25/08
Posted by: Opening the heart — Carolyn Haley
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