I tell people that my favorite place to be is "The Garden" and I put those words in quotes and in capital letters for a reason. You see, I have many gardens, but my two biggest ones are my actual outside gardens and my mental garden that is "my heart and soul garden." What I have found over the years is that the ways in which I take care of my outside gardens are also the ways I need to take care of my inner ones.

I have said that one day I will write a book called Everything I Ever Learned I Learned From My Garden because truly, the garden is where I have come to understand so many profound, beautiful, sometimes painful, and important lessons about Life. The Garden is like a mini-planet, and for those who tend a garden, you are that mini-planet's creator. It is a honor and a responsibility to be able to plant beautiful things into the soil and watch them grow. But as all good gardeners know, gardens take lots of work and daily maintenance. When it's right, it's oh-so-beautiful. But sometimes things go wrong, and when they do, gardeners sometimes have to learn things the hard way. Plants can be so fragile- not enough or too much water, too much or not enough sun, bugs that kill, or damaging weather can put even the most seasoned of gardeners to the test. Often, some plants do too well, so well that they want to dominate all the others around them. When this happens, the gardener sometimes has to make tough choices, like removing part of the overbearing plant, essentially destroying something beautiful, something that is living and thriving in order to let others have a chance at life, a decision that can be a difficult and painful one.

Being in the garden is where I do some of my best thinking, and every time I'm there, I can't help but see all the parallels between the garden and gardening and being a human and living in this world. So first, imagine yourself and your life as being a kind of garden. Look around you and what do you see? Are there others around you, friends and family, who enjoy sharing the same soil with you providing their own unique spot of color to the overall landscape? If so, that's a good and healthy garden. Perhaps you see yourself as one of those shadowed flowers that has become eclipsed by a monster plant (person) who does not know how to scale back and let other around them shine. If so, it may be time for you to replant yourself in more fertile and welcoming ground where you can shine with others and the sun can also shine on you. Perhaps when you look around you don't see a lot of color or flowers or much of anything at all, as if you were scattered onto a dessert somewhere. If this is the case, perhaps you have lost your way and just need to find you way back to where your other garden-mates are.

Flowers in a garden represent our thoughts, ideas, relationships, dreams, wishes, hopes and goals. It is just human nature to want to see all our "flowers" in our gardens at once, but sometimes we think we only have one garden and everything we want has to get planted in this one garden or we will never get to see it. I have come to realize that throughout our lives, we are given plenty of gardens to tend if we want them. We can have as many gardens as we want. We can have really big ones, small ones, but either way, there is room for every thought, every idea, every relationship, every dream in your life ... but all in good time. Not all flowers flourish at the same time, so why would all dreams, ideas, hopes and goals be any different? The trick to gardening is to know how to plant things so that there is color all year long. The trick to life is just the same, which is to spread out your dreams, your hopes, your goals, wishes and ideas that will provide your life with color that lasts a lifetime.

To me, there is nothing more beautiful than a garden, or a life, that was planned with great thought, followed by consistent love, nurturing and care, and most importantly, regular evaluations and the ability to make changes along the way, no matter how painful they might seem at the time. Ask any gardener and what they will almost always tell you is how much they love what they do, even though it takes a lot of work, work which most people never see them do.

This, I believe, is the case for most people who live rich, healthy and colorful lives, for as the gardeners of their life, they are working hard behind the scenes in ways most people never get to see. Only the beauty of their garden is what people notice. A beautiful garden is something most people just can't help but stop and admire. So the next time someone pays you a compliment about you or something about your life, consider yourself, your "Garden" stopped at and admired.