I do not consider myself a gardener at all, but a man who loves to see and take photos of flowers. I had a garden for several years at the cabin where I wrote “Running To The Mountain.” Once again, as many times before, I followed my Beavis & Butthead approach. Because I am stupid, I am free. Because I don’t know what I am supposed to think and do, I am sometimes free to think for myself. I loved my garden, it was pure chaos and there was no one to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do.

I love that sense of freedom and exploration you get when your head is not full of warnings and instructions and regulations, and you just follow your own instincts, have wonderful successes and spectacular failures. Isn’t this how we learn? The garden world is, I suspect, like the animal world, filled with traditions and cliques and free spirits and creative geniuses. Will I become a  gardener or just a photographer who likes bright colors? I don’t know. My Dahlia got to me today, I have to say, I think it is a mystical flower. I thought I heard it whispering to me in my office tonight, I thought it caught a shooting star and swallowed it whole. How else to account for that glow off of the late afternoon sun.

My Dahlia says I will become a gardener, but I am doubtful. I do not have a long attention span, my knees hurt kneeling and there are a lot of do’s and don’ts in the gardening world. Yesterday I lost a few young plants because I insisted on putting them out in the garden – I am not patient – and a frost came and killed some. Yet I would do that again. It is my way. I learn more from my failures than my successes.

I wonder where this gardening thing will go? I wonder how far I want it to go. But I won’t take any risks with my Dahlia. She will stay her with me. She told me so.