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People are like plants, the more you use tender loving care and give them their space, the more they grow. Here is a story which tells us the same.
I remember reading a beautiful book by Frances Hodgson Burnett called ‘The Secret Garden‘. It is about how a little-orphaned girl’s personality blooms as she nurtures a neglected garden. Which makes me think, doesn’t the mind expand as it watches things grow?
I am not a gardener. I prefer to spend my time reading, writing or listening to music, but I love going to my mother’s balcony. Now my mother, at 84, still finds time to fuss about nurturing her balcony garden. Anything she touches blooms. Talk about having a green thumb!
I often wondered why plants did not bloom so easily when I planted them. It was only recently that I realized that it all has to do with where you put your attention.
My attention is on my books and music while my mother’s is on her plants. What you give your love and attention to, grows. The plants bloom because they sense that they are needed in that space. They sense that there is someone who plants and grinds manure, and watches over them. They are given the best they can get and they respond by being the best they can be.
Well, though I may not toil and labour over them and give them too much attention, I have an entry into the space of their warmth just because I love them and accept them there.
So when I go there with my morning cup of tea and sit in the darkness of dawn to embrace a new day, they spread out warm tendrils embracing me.
And as the garden has taught me to accept, I have begun accepting things I found difficult to only a few months back – like my mother’s ageing. The hands that nurtured the plants are too tired to dig and toil now. So when she feels agitated and does unreasonable things like moving pots from one balcony to another on a sudden whim. I try to convince her to let go and just enjoy the blooms but then as her fingers yearn to garden again, I give in and just humour her.
This is the time for everything and the time to nurture the person, who has nurtured many a garden and all her five children, happens to be now.
Sometimes giving in and humouring a person who is in a vulnerable place is a sign of the greatest strength.
Published here earlier.
Image source: pixabay
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