Where are your quiet places?

Since I am having a tough week, I find myself looking for the quiet spaces in my life. I love the nooks and crannies of our local library. They have huge windows, big tables, and quiet.....beloved quiet. One of my other places is sitting on bed in the loft in which I often sleep. It's quiet, and has 3 windows in the top of our 1946 Sears house. Those windows look out over our property. Even if I get only a few minutes in these places they are able to recharge my batteries, and help me gain a perspective on my sometimes too busy life.

The other place that has afforded me great comfort and peace this year has been my garden. My husband and I are first time gardeners. Truthfully, we picked a very poor year to start. We've had bad weather for gardening, and picked a very bad location for the garden plot. We planted tomatoes, squash, zucchini, onions, peppers, cucumbers and a few other of the usual garden dwellers. We didn't use pesticides or harmful fertilizers, but our weather did not cooperate with us. We had some minor successes, and some failure to thrive plants. We learned so much! We will be better gardeners next year. But the success or failure of our plants to grow is not what was valuable. I learned that I am disconnected from the real world.

Many of us think that the real world is the job we hold, the grades we make, the people that inhabit our daily lives. But for me the real world is the expanse of my heart and my soul. Nothing can contain my real world, my internal life. What is important is watching a seedling grow from the deep dark earth into something that feeds my physical body. Watching that seedling, however, is what feeds my soul. That is the real world.

My real world is what I touch in my heart and soul. It is hugging a tree to feel it's rough brown bark. It is walking under the shade of my 30 some odd oak trees. It watching my sleeping cats as they twitch while dreaming on my couch. My real world is feeling the love of my husband as his arms envelope me and I feel the loving safety of my emotional home.

These are the things of the real world, which is the best quiet place that I find.