With Wild Abundance
This is an excerpt from the weekly News-Loveletter. If you would like it sent to your inbox directly (with all the other juicy bits, including a mini joy practice), you can add yourself to my mailing list here.
The wild strawberry is an accident that took.
She snuck in with a succulent, the plant I’d purchased. I think she made the leap weeks earlier at the nursery while no one was looking. A runaway from her mother plant, their adjoining cord snapped when the trays of starts were relocated.
Diminutive, she was allowed to stay. I welcome her too. It’s all good.
The wild strawberry is down for adventure. She has wild in her name. I now know her people come from the woodlands of this region, her ancestors stretching back hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They carpet the forest floor where dappled light falls.
The strawberry goes where she wants to. How can I resist? She has now “peopled” my sanctuary garden with her children, sending out runners in all directions, quietly behind my back.
Three years later, the succulent I planted in her origin story hides beneath the cool shade of strawberry’s leaves. And now this strawberry mother—once a wild child escaping from her own family—proudly oversees her brood creeping into the cracks of my flagstone path.
Undaunted expansion. The thrill of growing forth.
We never grow in isolation. Our thoughts and words have runners. Like the strawberry, we leave before us and behind us tiny ideas in the heads of others, baby thoughts that expand and become things.
We will never know how big the strawberry fields of our imaginations will grow. The ripples of our impact run light years beyond us. Flowering, fruiting.
My strawberry’s mother plant cannot imagine what’s happened here, miles from that fateful nursery. But some part of her knows. And some part of us knows that our thoughts bloom, the words we say, grow.
That part of us can be tended with care. Our awareness can be grown and loved. We can plant good thoughts and good things.
Strawberry spreads. She blooms and fruits.
Her tiny red jewels light up the patch of sun-bright green. She’s so proud of her creation.
I line up with birds, bugs, and mice to appreciate her abundance. I pick berries to put on my morning chia pudding. Beauty and sustenance.
May my thoughts, words, and actions bring such sweetness to the world, unexpected.
And may I see the sweetness you offer and cherish it.