The Soulful Garden.


After my husband died, I spent a year alone on our farm before I sold it and had to leave. Neighbours, friends and family, especially my daughter and stepson were kind, caring and respectful of my solitude. Days alone in my big garden were painfully sad, beautiful and reflective.

I loved the garden. I grew it, worked it, got my hands in the soil, and wrote poetry there.

The garden is a metaphor for the soul. It is a universal metaphor, reaching across cultures, time and space, beyond the personal to a sense of the collective. The Beautiful Endings Poem is about a garden or a special place you shared with your own loved-one, a real or metaphorical place you now must leave or that will never be the same without them. I wrote the poem with those of you in mind who would one day read it.

Beautiful Endings Poem

As your days in this place
draw to a close
you see beauty everywhere
in the garden that you
planted and grew.

Absorbed
you want to take in
every moment
as though the whole world
is speaking to you.

We constantly meet
the little endings
like the loved pair of shoes
that can’t be repaired
just one more time

and sadly we discard them.
All practice runs
for the Grand Endings
we each must face.

It seems simple enough
the ending itself
has its own beauty

and like a forgotten glimpse
of the Holy Grail
the world lights up
with a hundred bird songs.

This chapter is done.
And if you listen
the whole world
is speaking to you.

Excerpt from Standing in the Fire: a companion book for facing the loss of your loved-one and life without them, by Diana Percy, October, 2020

Diana E. Percy, writer, poet, counsellor, is also a corporate mentor and board advisor. She is an Australian leader in midlife-elderhood, nonduality, and loss and renewal.

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