I garden.

There. I've said it. I once thought of this as for "old folks" and though my muzzle is more grizzled than when I formed that sentiment I'm not old folks quite yet. I've not gone to pot, not sedentary by any means--duathlon this weekend and triathlon the next--but I have come by, somehow, some *patience*.

It's a plain fact that when I play hockey with teens and undergrads I have to work my ass off to keep up and must rest a little more than twice as often. Gone are the days when--as in High School and undergad--when I would never leave the football field--started both ways--and rarely leave the ice--to give non-starters some ice time. Gone for good I imagine.

But there's still that newfound patience. Patience is a species of waiting and waiting is a species of stillness and stillness is a spiritual discipline. So I see this as a net gain. It's not that I've lost abilities which are *compensated* for by *settling* for something else. I *like* gardening, I wish I'd had the *ability* to do it years ago. Lacking that ability in my youth I *settled* for what I could get, which was unending endurance and energy turned away from malice only be being diverted into mindless sports. Now that I've gained the ability, I enjoy exercising it. Indeed, I now have a gardenish worldview. I began to acquire it along with acquiring my Catholic faith for Catholic evangelism is more like gardening than Evangelical evangelism (which is more like High School sports quite frankly).

The metaphor is so strong and biblically rooted that it now seems hard to imagine how I missed it as a dominant paradigm for so long. No doubt further reflection on this will lead to further bloggage but for now I'll leave you with this link (might only work for the next week) to a nice book review of a book on gardening as a spiritual discipline and with the first stanza of Robert Browning's "Rabi ben Ezra":

GROW old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand Who saith,
“A whole I planned,Youth shows but half;
trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”

(whole poem)