Gardens are forgiving. You can make mistakes, learn from them and go on doing the right thing. Gardens like nature do not hold your past mistakes against you or care what you did in the past. After working in the garden today I came in to find a series of email from a friend reminding me how mistakes in the past can come back to haunt you and intensify a stigma that you carry from the past.
Stigma Stains the Soul and contains a partial truth but does not define who you are unless you let it. As I said in the posting March 3, 2009 Persons who ‘talk too much’ are usually very vocal. ‘Terrorists’ often do promote terror.” However, a stigma does not define a person. A person with cancer is not cancerous as a person with a mental illness is not mentally ill.
I was thinking about this today since I often find myself speaking a message that people do not want to hear and thus find it easier to focus on the faults of the messenger than deal with the message, like teaching war and violence in a Catholic school. Being a person with lots of faults I make an easy target for those ignoring the message by attacking the messenger.
Often I think being so sensitive to what I consider injustice or violating conscience is a curse. But then I realize the paradox that curses are often blessings. My deceased son Peter and my gardens have helped me learn that mistakes of the past and stigma, deserved or not, can hurt but with forgiveness, even be it self-forgiveness, can become a blessings.
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