🌿 (Mid)Weekly Blessing: Weeding and Wondering

A photo essay on weeding, tending, wondering, and preparing for the road ahead

Dear fellow pilgrim,

The morning began at the kitchen table, with my daughter and her sleepover friend chatting over breakfast—open, vulnerable, delightfully honest in the way children are when the day is still young. I found myself just listening, held by the gentle truth of their voices.

Later, I stepped into the garden with my camera, to let the day unfold quietly. Between taking pictures and pulling weeds, something in me settled. I wasn’t trying to write, or prepare, or finish a thought—just noticing. A rhythm formed: observe, pull, pause, breathe.

Spring, of course, keeps going even when we think a season has ended. And though I thought our inner garden series was finished, the garden itself had other plans.

It was still calling to me. To sort my wandering thoughts. To ease my trembling heart.

In the background, the laundry I washed this morning flapped in the breeze—reminding me of the journey ahead. This afternoon I will board a flight, with my daughter at hand, heading back “home” to Germany for a time.

And as I tend to the garden a last time, and gather the first berries, I feel something else being gathered too—something inward, preparing me silently for the journey ahead.

All of it—kitchen talk, garden soil, laundry lines—feels like a kind of soul tending.

So here, from this in-between place, is a blessing for you.

A Blessing

May you find small openings in your day—
to put your hands to what is growing,
to listen to what is honest,
to sort what no longer serves,
and to carry what is yours
lightly,
like a basket of clean clothes in the sun.

Blessings to you in this time of lengthening and deepening, Almut

A gentle wondering

• What are you tending right now—
  in your home, your body, your inner life?

• What is quietly preparing you for the next stretch of your journey?

Go gently, dear one.
Tend what is yours to tend.
The garden remembers.

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Further reading from our Gardening as Spiritual Practice Series:

• Stirred waters and memorial yards

• Gardening as Monastic Practice

• Gardening as “Sacred Rebellion”

• Hildegard of Bingen on Viriditas and the Greening of the Soul

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In case you missed it

From our (mid) weekly blessings:

"Do you want to be made well?" Stirred waters and memorial yards

„It is sad that people die and don‘t resurrect immediately.“

When the Hallelujahs are Fading.

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About Cloister Notes

A letter for dancing monks and weary pilgrims in the intersection of psychology, philosophy and spirituality. Contemplations on being human to deepen your path, nourish your heart and build wisdom within.

About The Weary Pilgrim

Almut is a German American psychologist turned philosopher turned writer, traveler, photographer, retreat leader and mother of a kindergartener. She has taught and published on authors like Kierkegaard, Buber, Frankl, Yalom, Edith Stein, and Hildegard of Bingen. Almut is also a Benedictine Oblate and lives with her family in a little college town in the American Midwest.

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