As well as growing, River has become aware that things die. We talked a lot about the marigolds. We had bought them together, grown them for a while, then planted them out, whereupon they had all been eaten, leaving a sorry wasteland of fallen flowers and starkly bare stems.
This makes him sad: he wanted us to dig them up and take them inside to grow again, and led to a longer conversation about how things die and return to the earth, and how we then grow new things from that earth.
The sunflower seeds sprouting from the soil reinforced this lesson, but it is, of course, a hard one.
The sorrow itself is important: caring for things, and our sadness at their loss, is part of what drives us to nurture and be kind.
Use your sixty seconds today to consider this: what do you nurture?
Day 394 - To Nurture