Can our gardens, or anything else we are in charge of, be a metaphor for our life?

My garden, as those of you who are familiar with me, is something I take great joy in.  It is left untamed.  I love it in all of its natural beauty and wildness.  I never cut it back or into a shape.  I love when things grow into each other and you find a rose in the middle of a giant coleus bush (and mine is a bush, no longer a plant!) or when the hostas and the hydrangas are mixed up with each other so you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.   I find beauty in all of this.

Every day I water my garden and look for my rainbows.  My garden is full of animals of the both the living and metal variety and angels, again of the metal as well as the spiritual variety, and most days, I also have rainbows.  As I water, the sun reflects and rainbows happen.  The other day I had a double rainbow and also, to my extreme delight, two butterflies were playing with each other.  I had never seen anything like this before – they were flying in tandem, wings overlapping and they were playing.  It was so amazing to watch.  They played around for a good 5-10 minutes and then flew off.  All of this in my lovely garden.  I felt very privileged to have seen something so rare.

I watched a film the other day.  It was about a young Irish woman who loved nature and the wildness of the Irish landscape.  She became the youngest person to ever win a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in London.  She is considered one of the most influential garden designers of this century,  And what did she do, a wild natural landscape like none ever done at Chelsea.  The film called Dare to be Wild is about Mary Reynolds.  It opened my eyes and I realized that in its own very small, pot contained way, this was my garden – wild and free to be what it wants to be.  Could this be a way to live life – just accept the beauty of what is and not try to change to fit into an artificial mold created by society?  I wonder.

Can one break the molds of society and live and be happy as they are?  Can I allow myself to be like my garden, wild and free?  As a young woman, I was that person – free of society’s norms.  I danced to a different drummer.  Can this person be back?  Can my garden be an allegory of my life?  Am I going to allow myself to accept who I am and how I look and metaphorically, dance like nobody is watching?  I hope so.