From my garden

  May 27, 2009 – When people learn things, they sometimes think they have to share their miracles of discovery with the world. This seems arrogant to me.
  I have learned a lot of things in the last year or so. I’ve learned that I don’t know much.
  I didn’t know myself. I didn’t know many of the people close to me.
  I learned that fear is a disorder, and it lives quite apart from real problems or real solutions.
  I’ve learned to get help.
  I’ve learned to listen to help.
  I’ve learned that boundaries do not represent therapeutic jabber-wocky but speak to the dignity that allows people to live their own lives, and let other people live theirs.
  I’ve learned to let people and human experience into my life, and not to push either away.
  Living on a farm with animals does not guarantee happiness any more than money or rising stock markets do.
  Friendship matters.
  Loneliness corrodes.
  Love nourishes.
  Animals like dogs mirror us, the best and the worst, and show us something about ourselves.
  Someone wrote me the other day that I seemed nicer that I seemed a year ago, or then I seemed in some of my books. An interesting comment. I don’t believe people get more or less nice as they move along, only that they can learn, grow and change.
  I have learned that life is a discovery, and when I stop discovering something every single day, I will experience the first part of death, the second when my heart stops.
 I’ve learned that many of us are artists, and it is a joy and a miracle to let the artist in us live and be free, and not be suffocated by other people and by narrow circumstance.
  I’ve learned not to rant on too much about what I’ve learned. Tomorrow: writing, writing, writing.