Noonday Notes, Issue 2

Hello again, perhaps this will be weekly…

The garden is full of life right now — beans are my morning workout, cucumbers try to hide but I find them, basil is bumping, and peppers are small but plentiful. And yet, everywhere I look, I also see death. Yellowing leaves. Exhausted stems. Wilt and wear and endings. Even the green beans I’m harvesting — two pounds every morning — are showing signs of fatigue. Their abundance is evidence of their dying.

It’s strange, and sacred, how often this rhythm repeats itself in the garden: what gives life must first die. The plant matures, produces its best, and then fades — but in doing so, it offers nourishment. It hands itself over so that something else can live.  Sacrificial love in the garden…wwhhaatt???!!

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the mornings — how death, in the garden, is not failure. It’s fulfillment. And it’s not just the plants. It’s me, too.

Two years ago, my old self died when I received grace from God. That wasn’t metaphor — it was real. A kind of death that created something new in me. And since then, so much life has happened. Not a perfect life, not an easy life — but a new life. A rooted life. I finally have the peace I was searching for in all those other practices and substances.

I see it all echoed in 1 Corinthians 15 — especially verse 36:

“You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.”

And I think of Jesus saying, “It is finished.” Not a defeat — a fulfillment. A beginning.

So I harvest the beans. I mourn the squash. I wait for the tomatoes. I turn the soil and plant crops for “Fallow July” (thank you Brit for that) and I know that in this small patch of Earth, I get to witness the Gospel again and again.  And with that this Type 4 Enneagram is in a puddle of tears.

Read the rest of the Noonday Notes Issue 2 here