Choose your life.

This week, I found five unexpected surprises in my yard.  

1. Child with a bruised eye.  Just like a girl in a Norman Rockwell painting, she was quite satisfied to have a pulsing, darkening battle scar.   This somehow proved to the child that even though she is one of the smallest, she is also quite tough. She was in pain, but pleased nonetheless. 

2.  Bleeding Hearts.  Every year, Dog makes a bed out of this plant, wrecking it entirely.  He starts out by losing his tennis ball nearby, and tears up the earth looking for it.  This plant has always gotten in his way, and become nothing but a sleeping mat for Dog.  And I always get angry.  But not this year.  This year we outsmarted him by enclosing the plant with rocks.  We win!

3.  Poison Ivy.  Yep.  This is what Dog chose to roll about and play in, since he couldn’t reach the Bleeding Hearts.  Dog has had two very soapy baths this week.  He was alternately pleased, unhappy, and confused.  We lose.

4.  I will never go out in the woods again.  This girl wasn’t afraid of my camera in the least.  I am the one who found her, and I am terrified.

5.  Someone planted a garden here, long ago.  It’s only when I am too busy to breathe that I get surprises like this.  When I have no time to weed the garden, when I just let the green little sprouts alone, the strangest and most beautiful surprises pop up.  Sometimes it’s good to be too tired to meddle.  Lovely Things happen all by themselves.  

What is the point of all this rambling, you ask?

I’m getting there.  

Usually I just write about the Love, Joy, and Peace that I find.  

And I do find it!  Even in the strangest places.

That doesn’t mean that other things don’t exist for me.  The proverbial Poison Ivy, black eyes, creepy spiders…everyone has them. 

But we all get to choose what we want to keep in our pockets and memories.  I want to remember the Love.  I want to cherish the smile and contentment of a girl who played hard and won.  I want to treasure Joy in the plant that actually survived the Dog!  I want to remember this blueish flower.  It’s unique and exciting, and I did nothing to create or nurture it.  It needed me to step aside and let it be, in Peace.  I can appreciate that. 

So now you know.  Love, Joy, and Peace are here, right in the middle of everything creepy.  

And you get to choose what you want to hold on to.