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The Garden that Would Not Hurry
(Pdf can be found below.)
here was once a woman who wished to make beauty bloom.
She cleared a plot of rocky soil behind her cottage,
dug furrows, sowed seeds, and waited.
But each morning she came out,
and each morning the earth looked the same —
bare, brown, silent.
She watered twice, then thrice.
She sang to the ground,
scolded it, pleaded with it,
even pressed her palms into the soil
as if warmth alone could coax the green awake.
Still nothing.
She envied the neighbor’s garden,
where shoots already stood in rows.
Perhaps my seeds are lazy, she thought,
and bought new ones — faster ones,
or so the merchant said.
But when she scattered them,
the wind carried half away,
and the rest drowned in her over-eager watering.
One night, she dreamed of an old gardener
tending a vast orchard under moonlight.
He said nothing — only knelt,
and waited beside each tree
until a single petal fell into his hand.
When she woke, she went outside.
The ground was still bare,
but something in her had softened.
She touched the soil once, gently,
and went back inside.
Days passed.
Then weeks.
And one morning,
tiny green blades broke the surface —
so small she would have missed them
had she still been hurrying.
She laughed, not at the delay,
but at her own impatience.
The garden had always been growing,
only at its own pace.
A pace she could not see.
—William Zeitler
2025 September 28
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