Hard to imagine

Julia ♦ March 26, 2025 ♦ 2 Comments

What a difference 12 years can make! Then and now:
our York back yard in 2005, the year after we moved to Virginia, and 12 years later, last spring.

“Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or deny it, we have to protect it and turn it into a fruitful solitude. To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage but also a strong faith. As hard as it is to believe that the dry desolate desert can yield endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness is hiding unknown beauty.” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen

Sometimes when I cannot imagine any path to a happy future for myself, it helps to remember that most of life’s changes are gradual, and are as inevitable as the abrupt, more devastating crises. Whether positive or negative, change is happening even when we are scarcely aware of it. And change is not always about loss.

Looking at the photos above, I am startled to see the bare look of that back right corner of the fenced portion of our yard. I honestly don’t remember it ever looking like that, and I’m grateful that this photo I snapped of Drew practicing baseball happened to include it in the background. Otherwise it would have been lost to memory forever, as the azaleas we planted over the next few years grew and bloomed, and the camellias that were barely visible became full and taller than we are.

Though outwardly my life is still encumbered with seemingly as many responsibilities as ever, on a personal level my landscape feels as bare as the corner ground in that first photo. I have no way of knowing whether I will live long enough to see the desert of my loneliness become a garden of solitude; whether I will ever discover any unknown earthly beauty that might be hiding in the future.

One thing is certain: I’m not trying to run away from being alone. I want whatever years I have left to be fruitful ones, and as the author Jan Karon once wrote to me, “Talents are best nurtured in solitude.” She included that quote from Goethe in her inscription of an unexpected gift she mailed me, one of her books of quotations, along with a handwritten letter of encouragement. This timely gift, which felt and still feels like a small miracle, arrived in my mailbox near the end of 2005, the year that first photo was taken. Perhaps Karon’s love of quotations fed mine, and helped to inspire this blog when Jeff was diagnosed with cancer seven years later. The seeds of kindness she planted carried unpredictable possibilities within.

Do you ever feel lonely? Have aging, health challenges, the loss of loved ones, or distance from family members (geographical or emotional) isolated you, leaving bare ground in your life just waiting to be cultivated? As hard as it might be to imagine the results, I invite you to join me in the gentle and persistent effort that, with time and patience, might grace the years to come with blossoms yet unseen.

This post was first published seven years ago. My desert has indeed become a garden of solitude I couldn’t have imagined, sometimes messy but always with a unique beauty. My ordinarily private garden is often populated by others, as solitude now can be with the advent of virtual connection, and sometimes there is the joy of visiting with dear ones in person, whether at home or abroad.

This post was written before the Covid shutdown enabled me to take my first classes online at Oxford, leading to my current studies there. I also wrote it before the multiple crises in Matthew’s health and mine during the past four years. Through it all, there have been continued painful goodbyes along with joyful new connections or re-connections. Looking back, I see unmistakable confirmation of God’s continued blessing and mercy. 

The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.