A Patch of Violets


I was in a shop recently and found a postcard replica of a picture that used to hang in my childhood home.

I would fix my eyes and mind on it as a child and would live in the world it created. It spoke of an unseen reality.

So today when I walked down my wild, erratic garden after rain, a patch of violets awoke my memories of that world.

The original plant of violet, like the picture, was from my childhood home several decades and hundreds of kilometres away.

I held my breath in awe of my violet patch and gathered a handful to put in a white, porcelain vase. They reminded me that the unseen was as real as the seen.

One day, at the beginning of the world, a violet dropped a seed that for a thousand thousand generations afterwards dropped a seed. It came down through a flood; through a garden where sweated drops of warm blood sprinkled the earth as though to symbolically cleanse it; through a garbage tip in a garden where a man was crucified and his blood symbolically sprinkled even the garbage; through another garden where Mary, weeping, thought Jesus himself was the gardener.

And I found myself crying out, "Mary, Mary, he WAS the gardener. Without him there was no violet because without him there was nothing made that was made. His violet is in a vase on my desk."

I place the postcard beside my vase of violets. As I switch off the light the unseen presence hovers in the room. The icon from the past joins yesterday with today, together they fill tomorrow, and I am a child again.

‘Truly I tell you, unless you become like children,

you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ From Matthew 18:3

Elizabeth Price, Team writer with Just a Minute reprice@dragnet.com.au

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