Butterflies That Flutter By

Pretty, fragile butterfly
Why do you just flutter by?
I look and ponder, wonder why
Next door’s flowers catch your eye!

I have to admit that the man next door has done a wonderful job with his garden. It is real display of vibrant colours from a million bedding plants. It’s a garden that I wouldn’t mind sitting in.

Yesterday, walking from the car to my front door, I espied a trio of white butterflies flitting from flower to flower in my next door neighbour’s garden. There was so much colour and variety to catch their attention and keep them flitting around there all day.

Walking up the path to my own front door, I was aware of the lack of butterflies in my own neglected patch of grass and weed-infested borders.

“Where are my butterflies?” I whined!

“Where are your flowers?” said the voice in my head.

This year has been not a vintage year in terms of gardening. So much time and energy has been spent on other things that I have not got around to the garden. Holidays, and what I do in them, have been hijacked by one family crisis after another.

Make no mistake, my garden will never have the million bedding plants that next door has…I am too miserly to spend that much money at the garden centre! I wouldn’t be able to create the vision of beauty that exists next door. But…normally it’s not so bad.

So I spent an hour or two digging up two small flower beds. I pulled out the weeds, and made a million spiders and beetles homeless. All the best plants at the garden centre had been snapped up much earlier on in the summer, but I found a few daisies, carnations and Latin-named beauties on the sale shelves.

It’s not really the garden that I worry about. It’s the metaphorical one…the garden of my soul. I am not sure there is much planted their either. There is nothing there to attract the butterflies…those people seeking something that sustains and nourishes them.

And yet the spiritual garden isn’t as empty as it seems. Other people seem to see the flowers there that I can’t see. I didn’t plant them…but them I am not the only one who tends my garden, am I?