Breathe, Dream, Surrender, Receive: Wisdom Bestowed from My Garden

When I was in high school, I enrolled in a horticulture class. For an entire year, I spent a few hours each afternoon immersed in the study of plants, soil, and growing things. My classmates and I would board a school bus that transported us across town from the high school to a building near the vocational college. At the time, I thought I was simply learning how to grow plants. I had no idea that class would plant seeds of healing, wonder and transformation that would continue unfolding throughout my life for decades to come.

We began each afternoon in the spacious greenhouse, where we each had our own area to pot plants and tend to our growing seedlings. Our teacher was very kind, thoughtful, and soft-spoken, creating an atmosphere of calm curiosity. Breathe.

There, my love affair with the plant kingdom began to deepen. Looking back, I can see that I was learning far more than horticulture. The greenhouse became a sanctuary where I experienced the quiet coherence between the human heart and the natural world. Through the living energy of the plants, the nurturing space of the greenhouse, and the gentle presence of our beloved teacher, seeds of wonder, healing and connection were planted within me. Dream.

Once upon a time, years ago, I created fairy gardens in flower pots and, much to my delight, beautiful friends I worked with at the middle school bought them. Later, through Community Education, I taught middle school students how to create their own fairy gardens.

I have always believed fairy gardens are magical. Tiny plants, miniature garden arches, pebbled pathways, and fairies nestled among the greenery transform an ordinary flower pot into an entire world.

Fairy gardens awaken the divine child who still lives within me—the part that delights in wonder, imagination, and the possibility that magic may be hiding in plain sight. They remind me that enchantment is not something we outgrow; it is something we remember.

Perhaps that is why I smiled when I discovered two tiny mushrooms standing side by side in a flower bowl beside the Buddha. They looked as though they had been placed there intentionally--magical sentinels guarding a hidden fairy realm.

Yet no fairy gardener had arranged them. They had emerged from the rich, unseen mycelial network beneath the soil--a reminder that some of life's greatest magic is not manufactured but revealed.

Beneath every garden, beneath every dream, beneath every unfolding life, something is quietly growing in the darkness before it reaches toward the light.

As I gazed upon those tiny mushrooms, I was reminded that much of life unfolds this way. We rarely witness the hidden work taking place beneath the surface. Roots intertwine. Mycelium connects. Seeds soften and awaken. Then one day, what was invisible suddenly appears before us, and we call it a miracle.

Perhaps the miracle was there all along. Surrender.

The mushrooms perhaps are a metaphor for my own journey--my writing, my healing, my spiritual unfolding. For years it has been happening beneath the surface. Now, like the fruiting bodies of the mushrooms near the Buddha they begin to emerge.

"Some of life's greatest magic

is not manufactured, but

revealed."

Receive

P.S. Today, I see that same spark of wonder in my grandchildren as they gather flowers, build fairy worlds, create mandalas in the emerald grass from plants flourishing in my garden, and they gently hold tree frogs beneath the summer sky. The magic was never in the fairy gardens themselves. The magic was remembering how to see. I do not have to prove magic exists, but to remember how to notice it.