In the beginning, there was a garden. Not the first garden, the one with the fall and the exile. This one came after. This one was made by someone who had already been expelled, who knew what loss felt like, who chose — despite everything, *because* of everything — to plant again.
You dig a hole in the ground and you place something living inside it. Then you cover it up. Then you wait.
This is faith. This is also gardening. I have never been able to tell the difference.
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I have been building this garden for as long as I can remember. It does not exist in any one place. It is the garden behind my grandmother Vera's house in Fisketorp, where she grew roses and kept animals and baked bread early in the morning, filling the whole house with warmth. It is Epping Forest in November, when the light comes through bare branches and everything is grey-gold and still. It is the cherry blossom trees in early April, just barely opening, embarrassed by their own extravagance.
It is everywhere I have loved.
Love never dies in this garden. It changes form — it goes underground in winter, it dies back, it appears to end — but it does not end. The bulb is still there. The root is still there. Something is waiting, below the surface, for the right season.
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I am not a naive person. I have experienced loss. I know what it is to stand in an empty room and understand that something beautiful has ended. But I have also learned that an ending is not the same as a death. Things end and then they continue, in different forms, at different depths.
The daffodil blooms in November. Not because spring has come early. Because it has its own schedule, its own season, its own reasons. Because it was made to bloom and so it blooms.
*I bloom forth. Forever.*
This is not a hope. It is a fact. It is something I have observed in myself and in the world — in the cherry blossom and the elder tree and my grandmother's roses and every flower I have ever photographed in morning light.
Everything that loves, blooms. Even after the frost. Even after the loss. Even when the season seems all wrong.
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Come into the garden.
The gate is never locked. The gate has never been locked.
You are welcome here, whatever you are carrying, whatever you have lost, whatever has ended that you believed would last forever. Bring it in. Set it down under the roses. Let the morning light fall on it.
Let us see what blooms.
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*From* The Gospel of Planet Hope, Book III *Saga Bernadotte of St. Petersburg*