VintageTrish Card Art: ‘Mandala Egg’ Layered Hand-drawn Design Easter Collection 2018. My VintageTrish Card Collections available soon from this website in the SHOP.
This Australian summer season just passed, was the most testing summer I have had in my 25 year old garden. We seemed to have winds whipping out any remaining moisture in the soil for 8 months and baking heat and sun turning clay soil into ‘bricks’ then brick powder! In my area rainfall was the second lowest on record since records began and the highest temperature, 45.3 degrees celsius, was a culmination of several consecutive heatwaves which kept temps in the late 30 to early 40s for the majority of January and February. Even yesterday, ‘Autumn’, was 34.9 degrees celsius. I get that summer is summer, ‘what do you expect?’ and I love the sun. But I was also glad to wave it’s intensity goodbye for a few months, over the equator to the North. Really…why would I begin a blog on ‘Hope’ with that ‘bleak’ but true story?
I begin that way because I, like every other gardening friend I know and probably millions I don’t know, plant a garden for one reason–Hope. Within that journey each season is heartbreak and elation–just like life in general. I’m not alone when my heart breaks for an avocado tree I couldn’t protect from second degree burns and my macadamia tree began ‘melting’. Luckily I could save both, one of which was transferred to a pot and complete shade. Both water tanks were bone dry for months. I was grateful to have town water, which many farmers don’t have and had to buy in by the truckload just to keep cattle and crops alive. Many gardens across Australia , many casualties.
The gardeners who lost their gardens in the cruel bushfires this season will plant again. That I know because I have seen countless demonstrations of that in this driest continent on Earth over many years.
But…like Audrey Hepburn said ‘To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow’. It’s in moments of lack of hope, that Hope comes to the surface as that resilient human quality that gets us through the bad patches. Planting seeds is still not a confident activity for me–there’s no ‘knowing,’ just ‘hope’. But that’s good – every season no matter what the outcome for seedlings and gardens is an exercise in hope, and from that we gain resilience. Our gardens are the most amazing models of resilience. The resilience of Nature.
Pondering on this got me thinking of the symbols we use for hope. I’ve mentioned the seeds, they are one. The egg is another symbol of hope and new life. Whether you are religious or not, this Easter weekend gives us an opportunity to think about what an egg symbolises. The egg, just like the plant seed, or a mammalian embryo has every bit of information it will ever need, to LIVE. Nature wants it to LIVE. It is a symbol of hope but then must demonstrate that hope with qualities of resilience, in the life it goes on to encounter. Nowhere is it written in that seed, egg or embryo that ‘you can’t do this.’
In fact, what’s written in the Nature DNA coding of those symbols of hope, is quite the opposite of ‘can’t do this’ – YOU HAVE, DEAR ONE, EVERYTHING YOU NEED! Now that, my friends, is HOPE in action. That is my Nature, and yours.
© Trish McGill 2018
My doodle (below) for my card design pictured (above)–it’s own ‘symbol of hope’
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