Tending the Garden of the Heart: Presence + Inner Awareness
There comes a season in life when gratitude and grief begin to sit side by side.
Lately I’ve been feeling the quiet ache of watching my parents grow very old. If you are fortunate enough to have your parents into the later years of life, you may know this tender terrain. While they are changing before your eyes, you are also changing. Your body is not quite the same as it once was. Your thoughts move in new directions. Your understanding of time deepens.
It is a strange season of life… one where gratitude and grief seem to sit in the same chair.
Every time my father pulls away in his beat-up car, something in my chest sinks just a little. I watch him drive down the road and a quiet question passes through my heart:
“Will this be the last time I get to hold him much less see him?”
I know how blessed we are to have had these many years. I truly do. But gratitude does not erase the quiet truth that our physical time together is not endless.
And so the heart sometimes aches.
When I was younger, I believed we were supposed to sort of ignore such aches. To distract ourselves. To stay busy. To tuck the feelings somewhere out of sight so we could keep enjoying and moving.
But life and nature seem to teach something different.
Right now I am planting seeds in the soil.
Small hopeful things placed gently into Mother Earth.
And when I place them there, I am reminded that tending a garden requires patience with what is living inside it.
We do not rush the soil.
We do not scold the seeds for being slow.
We simply create space, water gently, and trust that something unseen is quietly at work beneath the surface.
The heart is not so different.
Grief arrives quietly and sits beside us. Not to harm us, but to meet us.
Researchers have even discovered that the tears we cry in grief contain a different chemical pattern than the tears we cry in joy. Something within the body seems to understand that sorrow, when allowed to move through us, has a cleansing quality almost like rain washing dust from the leaves.
But when we busy ourselves endlessly… when we choke back the tears and refuse to feel… grief does not disappear.
In my own quiet knowing, it settles somewhere within the body and waits. When grief and sorrow are carried for too long without space to move, the body often begins to speak through symptoms.
If we wish to grow older with an open heart… still soft, still curious, still able to love deeply then we must learn to tend to that inner garden.
Sometimes tending simply means sitting quietly with what is here.
Letting the tears fall if they wish.
No fixing.
No rushing.
No trying to make the moment different.
Just allowing. Simply being.
When I watch my father drive away now, I sometimes place a hand over my heart and breathe with the tenderness that is there.
And then I remember something the earth teaches us every spring.
Seeds are planted in dark soil.
We cannot see what is happening beneath the surface. Yet life is quietly working there: unseen, patient, mysterious.
Perhaps the same is true for us.
Perhaps when we allow the heart to soften… when we hold even a mustard seed of faith that we are somehow being carried… something within us is quietly growing.
Not in spite of love and loss.
But because of it.
So if your heart aches in this season of life, you are not doing anything wrong.
You are simply tending the garden of being alive.
May we always remember to tend to the tender places of the heart with the same patience we offer the earth
Work With Me
If something in these reflections resonates with you, I offer private sessions for those who feel called to spend time exploring the body, nervous system, and inner life together.
