Sunday May 31, 2009. My brother gave me a small tabletop rose bush earlier this year.  It arrived with one rose and a small rosebud.  Within 2 weeks, both roses were spent, and I placed the bush on the table in the sunniest corner of the back porch.  I mean, it being a tabletop rose bush and all. Weeks and then months went by and, although the rose got a couple of hours of direct sunlight each morning, it wasn’t really growing and it took 2 months until I saw another rosebud on it.  My brother would ask how the briar patch was doing.  Then I had the idea to plant it in the yard, just 3 feet from where it sat on the porch, and it immediately began to grow.  The full sun all day long made the difference.  I told Brother Jerry about it, and he said, “That little briar patch is kinda like people, you can baby and pamper them and try your best to make them bloom, but the flowers don’t appear unless you allow them to have their own little place in the sun.  Then the laws of nature brings forth the roses.”

I thought later how foolish to have placed the rosebush on a table on my back porch in the first place.  But I put it where I could see it when I sat in the living room.  In retrospect, that was like looking for the lost keys under the street light instead of in the alley where I lost them, simply because the light was better.  I initially did the same thing with my new vegetable garden grow box as well, but now it also has been moved to an all-day-sunny spot.   Both the rose and the vegetable garden are both thriving, especially after the rain last week.  It’s true: basically all I need to do is create a conducive environment, a space for it, and then sit back and watch Nature do her magic.  And stay out of her way.

The rains last week!  Oh, how the yards needed them. At one point I was walking outside in the rain, under my umbrella, and noticed that the rain wasn’t pouring out of my rain gutter; it was shooting right off the roof, over the top of the gutters.  As soon as the rain stopped, I got up on my ladder and investigated.  The top screens of the rain gutters were in place, yet the gutters were clogged with oakleaf mulch.  It only took about 30 minutes to take the screens all down, clean out the gutters and put everything back in place.

I love it when I can figure out how to do something like that myself, something that only takes a few minutes but makes a big difference.  Too often, I let a series of small jobs like that pile up, then the whole project seems so overwhelming that I never take it on.  I’m finally learning that doing everything little by little gets it done just as well.  House work, yard chores.  I don’t have to take it all on at once.  I can do it little by little.  As Abraham-Hicks says, “I can eat an elephant one bite at a time.“