I love Easter’s message about the certainty of renewal and resurrection for all of us. I love it not so much as a religious message but as a spiritual rule of life. Resurrection and renewal underscore the phases of our lives. There are repetitive patterns of death and renewal throughout. To move forward in life usually means we must leave something behind. Nothing lasts forever. Neither good times nor bad. Leaving things behind is what we need to do in order to grow. Graduation means the end of formal schooling and close connections to the pals you shared it with. Marriage, done right, is saying goodbye not only to singledom but self-centeredness. Birthing children means the end of a good night’s sleep for months on end. Okay, that shortchanges the enormity of how children affect us inside and out. When those babies eventually leave home to start their own lives a decade or so later, it can be a wrenching loss and upheaval for parents. But it can also be liberation. Time is finally available to allow us to return focus to our own interests. This pattern of death and rebirth occurs regularly in everyone’s lives. Time grants us the perspective to look back and accept the certainty of these patterns as the natural patterns of life. If we’re lucky, we get to say a gentle goodbye to every era of our life and welcome what is coming with open arms. Time presses on with or without us. Of course, it requires emotional balance and maturity to make those transitions seamlessly and successfully. Most of us traverse these fissures well enough, often accompanied by some measure of anxiety and trepidation. Most humans react predictably in the face of meeting the unknown. Farmers and gardeners are lucky to be more closely connected than most to these recurring patterns of birth, death, and rebirth. It puzzled me in my youth why gardeners – often older people – took such satisfaction from creating a garden. Looked like a lot of work for questionable results. Nowadays it makes more sense to me. A garden is a contained world we can create and tend through our own choices and efforts. We get to enjoy and share the joy from the beauty of flowers, the nourishment of fruits and vegetables, and a tract of grass that can be a carpet and a playground. A garden is also a guard against erosion – personal and spiritual. Cultivating a metaphorical garden inside ourselves that manifests in our outer life nourishes us and our loved ones. It is considered by some observers to be one of the fundamental ingredients for happiness. As the years press on, our sphere of control in the world outside gets smaller. But our inner world is eternally ours to manage. Reading books nurtures our inner garden. It takes us to places and worlds we may never visit in person and introduces us to all manner of exotica. Readers know this intimately. So do writers.