And yet, they persisted

This time of year I look at my garden with a hint of sadness – in the big picture, it’s a heap of decay – yellowed grape leaves, sunflower stems with no blooms, rosebushes reduced to brown sticks. But then you open your eyes a little wider and see something that looks like grains of tiny out-of-place pebbles, and so you lean in only to find the tiniest mushrooms you’ve never seen before, pushing up through the mulch. You spot some tiny green tomatoes next to some new blooms, which have not gotten the autumnal slumber memo. You spy a tiny strawberry intent upon ripening, purple asters pushing forth from faded stems. You see a drenched bumblebee clinging to a late-blooming sunflower expecting to find pollen once the rain stops and its wings dry; a new echinacea bud with all the confidence in the world that it’s never too late to do your thing; a star-shaped balloon flower bud busting forth months after the rest of them gave up; a Swan rose too heavy for its own good, yet it has blossomed upside-down, the weight of the changing world unable to stop it from unfolding. All these things remind me that life goes on, through adversity, through circumstances beyond our control, through the cold and rain that come to put a stop to the natural process of growing. Nature persists We persist. We must always persist because there is beauty in all of it – the wilting and the fading, and the growing and the surviving, the yin and yang of being alive, despite what the world around us demands.