Our garden abundant - life thickens too

Oh these steamy summer days.  Our garden is thriving though, as pictured above.  Enlarge them. especially the mostly green one that also shows the front of our house to see all the tomatoes on the two hanging plants - about 45 of them and one just beginning to redden.  We are quite pleased.  And my beautiful butterfly bush is filled with all types of butterflies - I was able to capture a picture of one as shown above.  Our daisies are so abundant - we even moved a large amount of them to another location along our brook.  Still, they fill in so thick.  The second and third picture of the pinkish flower?  I am embarrassed to admit I don't recall what it is.  Anyone know what kind of flower that is?  Thanks.

And so too, life thickens, realities and truths intensify and grow bigger, some good, some not so much. Our love thickens every moment - our gratitude for our bounty intensifies and the blessings grow bigger and more humbling.  Challenges increase too, mobility issues and pain management and adjustments to limits while maintaining an aura of celebration for all that is still possible. Such a delicate balance.  Summer, as it yields such green and growth and lovely scents of blossoms and sounds of birds and bees and the bull frogs bellowing at night - it also by its natural heat and humidity takes it toll on MS as my muscles struggle for every step, and my nerve endings excite in pain - I am given hope and the faith for new life as I look and feel and hear and smell and even taste the full growth and fertility and virility and beauty of summer.  By design it attacks me and revives me in one moment.

I have learned to redefine what success means. Let me explain by this example.  Skipp and I had a heart to heart about traveling. For me, when I walk from our front door to our car and travel down town and out for lunch I feel so normal and successful and so grateful.  If I stay focused on what I cannot do like travel more than two hours or navigate an airport I will be in a constant of "poor-me".  I refuse to live like that.  There are so many things I can do and at times I long for what I once was able to do without a second thought - those days are gone.  And new days of celebration of what I can do have emerged.  I was reading another blog and a dear friend of mine wrote about her desire to climb a mountain by a river near by.  I commented that for me, climbing a mountain has taken on a new meaning - when I make it up a curb or a step I have climbed a mountain.  Hallelujah!

To finally get to this place of celebrating my reality is life-giving, much like our garden.  Oh yes, the stuff I can't do is like the weeds in our garden trying to choke the life out of the abundance - out of me, -  so I choose not to focus on the weeds, - rather I do my best to celebrate the abundance of freedom and life in my vision. I never forget that the weeds (MS symptoms), are there because I have to tend to those weeds (symptoms),  so they don't take over.  Please don't think that I don't have my days of tantrums and "why me?", because I do.   But most days, after my woe-is-me times, seeing our garden and being loved is the best cure and life-giver to balance me. Soon it will be Autumn - a season of change.
Amen.