Lovepats

Sharing yesterday's post with d'Verse Poetry today.. scroll down past text below (...if you must ;) for my poem, The Dying Garden

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Working for hospice, I have a unique privilege to see many lives come through our beautiful residence and pass on.  No one ever wants to go and live in a hospice home.  No one ever truly wants to visit there either. But, for those who need it, it is a beautiful home that provides loving end of life care to patients and their families. 

The other day, a large group of volunteers came to weed and clean out the gardens there.  We worked hard all day, pulling weeds, pruning, cutting back plants, and sweating.  I stood up, dirt on my hands and knees, and looked around me.  I knew there was more going on than just weeding. After all, we were standing in a living garden pulling out dead things.  Think of it. 

Right then, quietly, one of our ladies passed away and I watched her 7 children spill slowly out into the gardens to sit by the waterfall and walk the paths, absorbing the sunshine and fresh air… tears gently falling.  

Then, I noticed this bumble bee.  It was the huge kind of bumble bee that ordinarily hovers near your head and makes you duck.  But this one was not hovering… at all.  It was not gathering pollen.  It lay, barely moving, sprawled on the bed of this hydrangea, the softest bed of death.  I hoped this is how I would go… finish the work that God has for me and lay down in a beautiful place to die.  Our hospice home is the beautiful hydrangea.

There is a certain place between life and death.  I do not know if it has a name.  I have not studied it… but I have experienced it.  It’s a sacred place of passing… and I was standing in a sacred moment.  I wondered if the outside garden I was standing in, mirrored the ‘garden’ inside the hospice house.  A garden of lives, with thorns, illness, personalities, families, legacys, historys and names.  I felt sure that this earthly garden filled with beauty, weeds, death, new life and thorns was a very tiny picture of the difference between the gardens on earth and heaven.  Paradise, where there will be no more dying, disease or sorrow.  

The Dying Garden

garden of the dying

weeds of death appear

slowly, quietly accepted

welcomed even

expected as thorns and thistles
among beauty

tend the sanctuary

regrets ignored grow quickly

pulling pain and illness

harvesting what is

grieving what wasn’t

watering with cleansing tears
forgiveness rain

travel  sacred paths to find

deeply rooted legacy

perennial memories

calming hearts with lavender laughter

buds of new life

as hope blooms

 in the breeze of colors

swirling around gratitude bouquets

lay me down

on bed of bliss

tender place of passing

hold my hand and stay with me

‘til I let go

to  walk the Living Garden

Patricia Spreng

Joining today with the wonderful words of writers at Play Dates with God hosted by Laura Bogess at the Wellspring and On, In and Around Mondays hosted by LL Barkat at Seedlings in Stone