Day 5: The Blue Gate

Before the sun comes up, on Sunday the 14th of September, I submit to a call to write. The well of thoughts run deep and full...which ones do I bucket and spill out first? In the quiet, an image comes to mind, and I wonder what would come out if I just described the story in my mind's eye... 

Via

 

I find myself inside the gate. My hand reaches out to touch the weathered wood. I can feel the smooth places between the chippy blue paint and I wonder if this is real. In my mind this gate opens up to a beautiful well-kept garden, ordered, maintained, restrained. Yet very beautiful.

Beds of lush colourful blooms, amidst tall green trees. Canopies of crisp blue sky between puffs of white show off this organised splendour.

Do I want to leave this wild and tangled garden to walk beyond the mass of foliage uncontained? To step onto the manicured lawn and disturb this visual perfection.

Behind me, I hear the melody of falling water, a soft murmuring overflowing the rim of a cracked concrete fountain, drizzling into the clear pool below.

There is a path, slightly overgrown, that has been flattened by my slow barefooted tread. Turning, and purposely reflecting on this image behind me, I still my thoughts to take it in. It's a different kind of beauty. Wildflowers abound peeking through wispy thigh-high grass. The kind I loved to pick and dry in bundles as a child.

Tears well up. Why? This is just a figment of my imagination after all...this...this vision isn't real...Why the sudden emotion? 

The smell of roses, yes, I see them, a thick abundantly flowering hedge. Outgrowing, holding out the fragrant overflow onto a welcoming wooden bench. It beckons to be felt, the warm afternoon glow, and I sit. Breathe. Inhale a sweetness that tastes like rest.

From this vantage point it is easy to see these are two very different gardens separated by a low, dry stone wall, intimating one landowner...Could such dichotomy exist in harmony?

( This is what I found when searching the meaning of dichotomy, this word that popped up in my story;  

• It is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts. 

• It is the partition of a whole into two parts that are: 1. Jointly exhaustive; everything must belong to one part or the other, and, 2. Mutually exclusive; nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts. The two parts thus formed are complements.
• From the Greek dichotomia; dividing in two from dicha; "in two, asunder" and tome; "a cutting, incision"
• In theology and philosophy, dichotomy is the belief that humans consist of a soul and a body. )

 This brings to mind the word in Hebrews 4:12 AMP

  For the Word that God speaks is alive and full of power [making it active, operative, energising, and effective]; it is sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating to the dividing line of the breath of life (soul) and [the immortal] spirit, and of joints and marrow [of the deepest parts of our nature], exposing and sifting and analysing and judging the very thoughts and purposes of the heart.

 I sense that exposing, sifting, analysing and judging going on in my heart and I don't know if I like it.
But...

I'm choosing to sit down on the bench and rest in the process.

In the garden with my Beloved.


This is day 5  of  31 Days; My story, His story.
Ps. I found the picture on Pinterest after this was written. It best depicts the gate I imagined.