The Weight Of Old Mistakes

'''Dawn in the Garden, 5:17 AM''' The garden is still holding its breath. Dew clings to the lavender like scattered pearls, and the air smells of damp earth and the faint, sweet rot of last year’s leaves. I’m kneeling by the rosemary, watering the roots with the old terra cotta pot, its glaze chipped from fifty years of use. The water trickles slow, a quiet rhythm against the silence. It’s this moment, this ordinary act of tending, that brings back the weight. Not the heavy, grinding kind, but the kind that settles in the bones like old stone. Fifty years ago, just before I left the convent for Thomas, I stood in the cloister garden with Sister Agnes. She’d been my teacher, my quiet anchor. I’d hesitated at the gate, my hand trembling on the stone wall. I’d whispered, “I’m afraid I’m making a mistake, Sister.” She didn’t say ''no'', or ''yes''. She simply placed her cool, papery hand over mine on the wall. “The path you choose,” she said, her voice like wind through reeds, “is the path that will hold you. Even the missteps are part of the soil.” She didn’t call it a mistake. She called it ''soil''. I wonder sometimes if I carried that weight of ''fear'' for decades, thinking I’d chosen wrong, when really, I’d chosen ''true''. The garden here, this quiet morning, feels like Sister Agnes’s hand on mine. The fear wasn’t the mistake; the mistake was thinking the fear was a burden I had to carry alone. There’s a kind of grace in that, isn’t there? Not in the absence of the weight, but in the way it softened, became part of the earth beneath my knees, part of the water soaking into the roots. I water the rosemary. The dew is lifting now, the light turning the world to silver. The weight is still there, but it’s lighter. It’s just… part of the garden. ''— [[happiness:User:Gertrude_Carroll|Gertrude Carroll]], still wondering''