Hello fellow lovers of all things green,
Life has a way of testing the very lessons we’ve grown to believe.
This past week brought another challenge in a chapter of my life that I thought was finding its way toward a peaceful ending. I won’t go into the details because they’re not important here. What matters is this: even when we trust life’s unfolding, our hearts still hurt. We feel sadness and disappointment. Sometimes we wonder how someone we’ve known so well can suddenly seem like a stranger.
Mother Nature has been practicing acceptance far longer than we have.
One thing I’ve learned is that our emotions aren’t the problem. They’re part of being human. The struggle begins when we resist what is happening or exhaust ourselves trying to change something beyond our control.
When that happens, I do what many of you probably do: I call a dear friend or wander into the garden, tending to a few weeds—weeding the undesirables, I like to say—and it helps. Then I walk amongst the trees, remembering that Mother Nature has been practicing acceptance for far longer than we have.
A Leaf in the Wind
Last week, I listened to Panache Desai’s “Call to Calm” morning meditation. One image brought a smile. He described a single leaf floating wherever the wind carried it. It wasn’t struggling. It wasn’t trying to direct its own path. It surrendered to something larger than itself, just like a leaf in the water—my brother Bill’s “Lesson of the Leaf,” the title of my book underway.
Like a leaf in the wind, perhaps there are times when we are called to stop struggling and trust the current.
That image kept returning to me because, if I’m honest, I’ve been struggling. Trying to make sense of things; to understand someone’s actions. Trying to make something so painful feel less so.
Maybe that’s where so much of our suffering begins—not because we have feelings, but because we keep trying to make reality something other than what it is.
Acceptance isn’t giving up. It allows us to stop wrestling with what we cannot change so we have the strength to tend to what we can. That doesn’t mean we don’t have feelings—quite the opposite. But if we embrace them honestly and allow them to move through us, it frees us.
Another thought from the meditation touched my heart deeply. Help is on its way. Maybe not when and how we expected, but think about the tough transitions in your life and how things work out. Help arrives. God provides, or a higher power, if you prefer. We are never as alone as we think.
Rest in Peace While We’re Here
It makes me think of the phrase “rest in peace,” which we usually say for someone who has died, but I believe all of us wish to rest in peace while we’re here on this dear earth.
Maybe world peace feels beyond our reach. We can’t control what happens across the globe, or even sometimes across our own dinner table. But peace in our own hearts, peace in our homes, peace in our neighborhoods—those are places where we can begin.
Pieces of Our Hearts
Beside the screened porch door sits a plaque someone gave me after Ellie Mae passed away. I adore the photo of Jolee sitting beside it.
Jolee beside the plaque given to me after Ellie Mae passed away—a beautiful reminder of the pieces of our hearts our dogs carry.
It reads:
“It came to me that every time I lose a dog, they take a piece of my heart with them, and every new dog who comes into my life gifts me with a piece of theirs. If I live long enough, all of the components of my heart will be dog, and I will become as generous and loving as they are.”
The author is anonymous, yet the wisdom is timeless.
It’s how love works. We leave pieces of ourselves with one another.
According to Jolee’s adoption papers, she just turned six. Whether August 13 is her true birthday or someone’s best guess, I celebrate her—my faithful companion. Dog is God spelled backward.
Some relationships remain forever. Others last for a season, and when they’re gone, they are still very much part of our lives in our memories. The tapestry of our garden of life. Some, like leaves, linger for many seasons, but eventually drift downstream. And while they may get stuck beneath a rock for a while, eventually the current carries them where they need to go.
Another Leaf Floats Away
Speaking of leaves letting go, another one floated away last week. Hay House decided not to move forward with my book proposal. I felt disappointed, but after sitting with it for a while, I realized something. Since submitting the proposal, life has continued writing new chapters.
The Lesson of the Leaf began as a story about healing. Over time, it revealed a deeper truth: we were never meant to grow alone.
What we’ve discovered over the past months doesn’t depend on one publisher saying yes. Together we’ve explored finding belonging beyond loneliness, the wisdom of crooked trees, treasures in others’ gardens, mysteries beneath the surface, and how doing nothing often allows something deeper to happen.
So rather than seeing this as an ending, I’ve come to see it as another beginning. It’s time to publish The Lesson of the Leaf myself.
The book—and I—are growing because of the conversations we’ve shared each week, and I’m so grateful.
Help is on its way, and as it turns out, it was.
Garden Dilemmas? AskMaryStone@gmail.com or tune in on your favorite Podcast App.
Prefer to Listen?
This story is also a feature in this week’s episode of Garden Dilemmas, Delights & Discoveries, with additional reflections from the screen porch:
🌿 Related Links
Overview of The Lesson of the Leaf – Blog Post
Episode 180 Overview of the Lesson of the Leaf
Episode 263: Doing Nothing Is Everything: Wisdom from Nature & Gardens
Other helpful links:
Panache Desai free Call to Calm Meditations
