Walking through the ditch at the front of our yard, stepping up and over vinca (what my in-laws called graveyard vine), bending over to cut unwanted tree/bush/vine seedlings — varieties of privet, hickory, cedar, sumac, ash, elm, oak, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle — a song popped into thoughts already dominated by a different song and different thoughts detailed later:

My breaking heart and I agree
That you and I could never be
So with my best
My very best
I set you free

I wish you shelter from the storm
A cozy fire to keep you warm
But most of all when snowflakes fall
I wish you love
But most of all when snowflakes fall
I wish you love

Those lyrics played over the previous song in my thoughts, “Everything is beautiful“:

Jesus loves the little children,
All the little children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in his sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

Everything is beautiful in it’s own way.
Like the starry summer night, or a snow-covered winter’s day.
And everybody’s beautiful in their own way.
Under God’s heaven, the world’s gonna find the way.

There is none so blind as he who will not see.
We must not close our minds; we must let our thoughts be free.
For every hour that passes by, we know the world gets a little bit older.
It’s time to realize that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

And everything is beautiful in it’s own way.
Like the starry summer night, or a snow-covered winter’s day.
Oh, sing it children!
Everybody’s beautiful in their own way.
Under God’s heaven, the world’s gonna find the way.

We shouldn’t care about the length of his hair, or the color of his skin.
Don’t worry about what shows from without, but the love that lives within.
And we’re gonna get it all together now; everything gonna work out fine.
Just take a little time to look on the good side my friend,
And straighten it out in your mind.

And everything is beautiful in it’s own way.
Like the starry summer night, or a snow-covered winter’s day.
Ah, sing it children!
Everybody’s beautiful in their own way,
Under God’s heaven the world’s gonna find a way.
One more time!
Everything is beautiful in it’s own way.
Like the starry summer night, or a snow-covered winter’s day…

While I bent over and stood up, bent over and stood up, weeding the ditch step-by-step so that the major/minor/variegated vinca would be the plant(s) of choice, I remembered a story Mom told me.

My mother’s parents kept a large garden in the back part of their small farm.

As any gardener knows, weeding a garden is a regular part of growing your own food — you can see it as a chore or as a delight.

One summer, my grandparents took Mom out west in the late 1940s, traveling parts of Highway 66 and getting all the way to California from Tennessee.  The trip took a month to complete.

Well, as much fun as they had in a car before air conditioning was an affordable option, four weeks away from the farm meant one thing — LOTS of weeding and farm work when they got back.

Mom and her father spent long hours weeding out the beds of potatoes, corn, strawberries, grapes and other crops, a “deal” my grandfather cut with my mother for letting her have fun with them on their special, dream vacation to see this great country of ours.

Because I haven’t been able to sleep for a long time, I tried a product called Zzzquil last night.  I still didn’t fall asleep until after midnight (it couldn’t be the five cups of coffee earlier in the afternoon, could it?) but I had five hours of uninterrupted sleep afterward, not even noticing our cats curling up with my on the sofa in the sunroom.

I don’t even recall my dreams.

Except for one small thought that lingered as I dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved blue shirt to work in the yard this morning, imagining myself in my grandfather’s place, actually older now than he was then working with my mother on the farm, looking forward to getting to know the soil, insects, seedlings and personal meditative thought patterns as I worked.

Do I, do you, respond more to the words of a message or its emotional context/content? [What exactly do I mean by “emotional”?]

And, by extension, when we lay dying, do we quietly look for a signal that says when it’s all right to die?  How possible is it for us to work our friends/acquaintances/workmates network to find the signal we’re looking for?  How possible is it for us to feel/sense/hear the signal-seekers in our regular pattern-matching daily lives?

In other words, are we pattern-matching from womb to tomb?