Dear Kiantha: Garden this spring with plans for harvesting patience and love

Dear Kiantha,

What are you most looking forward to for spring?

Dear Friend,

Spring is my favorite season for many reasons. The first being the view of everything around me coming alive. There is something about that symbolism that says new year and new opportunity for growth.

Each spring, I promise myself that I am going to plant a garden. I hype myself up by looking at which bulbs I will plant. I study to great depths the type of raised flower beds I will purchase, and every year, my fear of being a first-time gardener takes over and I end up not planting a single seed. I do this religiously; I think this makes my ninth spring that no garden has sprung.

Although my plans don’t come to fruition, watching the trees bloom and the color of the grass change from brown to green makes me feel alive. It makes me feel as if I, too, have the ability to bring things to life in the same way nature does. I feel free and I feel creative. I feel limitless.

Some people garden because they enjoy the harvest of their crop, others because they enjoy the feeling of soil in their hands. There is a sense of gratitude that one feels knowing that it is soil from which all things grow.

The desire to garden for me is a reminder that my patience, love and tenderness will always produce a return. With so much hatred in the world, “gardening” this spring is what we should all be doing.

Now in good fashion, I will start my research again soon for this spring, whether that be wood beds or fancy garden beds from Australia, and, while my search may again lead to no backyard garden, what I will be sure to do is plant seeds of love and hope all around me this spring. I hope you will join me in doing so.

Soul to soul,

Kiantha

Dear Kiantha can be read Fridays in The Spokesman-Review. To read this column in Spanish, visit www.spokesman.com. To submit a question, email DearKiantha@gmail.com.