Hush...It's 2013

Edgeworthia chrysantha with Euphorbia robbiae

It’s a drippy New Year’s Day.  It started with the softest of drizzles and opened into an earnest rainfall.  It’s 2013.  Perhaps this morning, out in the wide world, we are a people careening off a fiscal cliff or spawning innovative plans for managing climate change, population density, and the capricious world markets.  Perhaps this rainy morning, you are a person pounding the Gatorade in need of detox, furrowing your brow to lists of goals about sleep, diet, money, time management.  Me, this morning, I’m myself in my cozy cottage, grateful for the rain that cloaks my epic planning and ruefulness with a quiet hush.  It's somehow enough to have a warm cup of coffee, my fluffy dog, and good music filling up my space.  A rich little space I gladly inhabit this morning.  I have Fatsia flowers in a jug from my garden.  The Fatsia have been in the ground a full three years now; this December they presented chunky white ornaments of bloom in time for the holidays.  The flowers I cut are pretty spent, and the miniscule petals litter the countertop.  I haven’t wiped them up.  

And I can look outside and see how my Rodhea japonica ‘Picadilly Farm’ finally has some new growth, its variegated straps creating a flute for the drops of rain to spill down into the crown.  I know that the Edgeworthia will fill up January with its subtle fragrance and stark branches.  There is a hardy Cyclamen hederifolium ‘Album’, whose silver leaves and soft pink flower caps emerged this fall without my even remembering it was there.

Cyclamen h. 'Album'

Rodhea japonica 'Picadilly Farm'

Today, the rain is my teacher, grabbing my hand and sitting me down with a whisper of stillness.  I have no need for resolutions or penance.  Today in my garden, the shredded banana tree leaves can stay put, hanging heavy under fat drops of rain.  I’m not gonna cut them off.  Neither am I rushing to cover the exposed roots on my Hedichyium greenii, which will be hit hard in the next freeze.  Today rain will wash away such efforts. Instead it leaves me only gratitude this January morning.