01.22.2024 | Ordinary Monday

It's dark and icy outside in the Carondelet Garden.  I had to find a picture that brightened things up a bit because it is rather gloomy this morning.  The freezing rain will be sticking around until late morning when everything will change over to all rain as the temperatures rise throughout the day.  Good news for later.  Stay put for now!

It was a restless night for the old gardener in Carondelet.  Have you had one of those nights where you couldn't get the old brain to settle, and darkness made its way into your thoughts?  The early church fathers talk of a Dark Night of the Soul.  Not quite that dramatic, to be sure!  Yet, certain restlessness and anxiousness.  As I tried to regain my sense of strength and reality, I began to think of some of the things I am planning for the garden and about nature in general.  It seems that nature's perfect indifference has become the best cure for my own anxieties.  I'm looking forward to getting out there more regularly!

These days my faith waivers and sometimes fades away, but that is when I find that I have so little to offer other than my faith and hope and whatever love I can muster.  It seems as though faith and hope are the last things I can offer.  It seems to me that this old world needs us now more than ever, but I can't be of much use in a perpetual state of exhaustion and fear.  I continue in hope!

Be good and be kind to yourself this Ordinary Monday.  Hang on to your faith, keep on hoping and love with all you have.  We need all the faith, hope and love we can muster right now.  That's all the news from here in the Carondelet Garden.