Photographers and artists call it the golden hour – those brief moments when sunlight and scenery come together, revealing a richness and depth to creation that is seldom visible. This “golden hour” is gracing my garden as it comes back to life after a rather cold winter.
It’s spring and my garden expresses its pleasure in a mist of new green that now adorns the branches of my trees. Like slender ladies showing off a new dress, my trees sway in the lavender-scented breezes that perfume my garden, their sweet new leaves swirling like lace as they dance beneath a benevolent sun. Flowers luxuriate in the lushness of warm, damp soil, unfurling brilliantly hued petals in glorious, extravagant abandon with no thought to the coming heat of summer.
Perhaps it’s the awakening of my garden that gifts me with a momentary “golden hour” perspective of life’s seasons. In between my endless client projects and the onslaught of deadlines, I return again and again to my garden and the seasons of life it reveals.
Each has its own beauty, its own lesson to teach. I would do well to remember this; to fully immerse myself into each moment of every season – and then let it go; like letting a field go fallow so it can mend itself and regenerate health and renewed life.
But I don’t. Too often I find myself fearing new seasons like I do fallowness. I cling to what I already know and understand how to tend, not trusting that the next season will reveal its own beauty in its own time, teaching me what I need to know in the process. What if nothing new grows? Can I survive the storms? Will I know how to tend what emerges? Can I live with empty fields for a time, trusting that beauty will grow from barrenness?
Most of the time, optimism is lost in these tall weeds. But, at least for this moment in my life, it’s the golden hour. And like the green mist in my garden that is turning barren sticks into lacy branches, I’m watching as new life emerges from a fallow field after a long and bitter winter. I’m not yet sure how to cultivate what’s growing or what the harvest will be, but it’s nice seeing green again.
Bits & Pieces 
Beautiful.
Wow. Beautiful indeed.
Rhonda, thank you again for touching my heart with your words and pictures. You provided me with a “golden moment’ of my own. 🙂 Absolutely gorgeous!!
This is lovely. My blog is called “revive the vine.” I love irony: I could not explain why I wanted to call my blog that and it’s only after reading your post that it seems so clear. I love what you said about turning “barren sticks into lacy branches.” Beautiful. Isn’t it wonderful to have a God who makes all things new?