A conversation I had recently about purpose in our lives has been buzzing quietly in the back of my mind. I had the conversation this past Sunday, a quiet rainy day at the end of a quiet rainy weekend. I’d drifted a bit through the weekend as sometimes happens when I don’t have much scheduled. On these drifty days, I read, relax, putter in the garden, connect with friends in person or by phone, and am mostly content but there can be a nagging sense that I should be more –well, purposeful with my time. And the person I was talking with on Sunday echoed this thought in talking about her own day-to-day life.

For me this buzz is mostly background noise since my days are filled with going to work and maintaining my life outside of work. But the low buzz is there and gets louder on weekends and other stretches of leisure time. “What can I do that’s purposeful this weekend?” I wonder. “How can I be productive?” All too often, this wondering turns into fretting.

As I type this I think about my previous post on garden paths and my appreciation of meandering, whimsical paths. And this leads me to thinking about writing, which requires frequent strolls along those meandering paths. So, sitting here on a bright late June morning, I wonder if, for myself, I should shift the internal conversation. Maybe it’s less about purpose and more about simply being awake and receptive.

In order to write, I need to wake up and let myself see, not just what’s going on in imagination but also see the detail of my small world. The Japanese iris with its silky fall of petal, the waves of daylily bloom, orange and yellow and burgundy.

Right now the crows are busy and noisy–I suspect there’s a cat or a raptor out there somewhere. Sun is filtering through branches, lighting up the top of the maple tree and the big pine. Everything else is shadowed. The sky, glimpsed through trees, is clear and blue.

In order to write I need to let myself see without purpose. It’s all too easy to wander around the garden noting what needs to be done rather than simply noting the shapes, textures, colors, scents–Monarda and phlox about to bloom, roses pink and cream and the glistening backs of Japanese beetles feasting, bristly prickly nettles, fine blades of grass grown thick in the rain.

“I’d like to put in a couple of paths,” Tom said. He led me around the side of the house and gestured to the grassy path that leads between the rhododendron and the daylily bed toward the back porch. “Here’s one place–get the sod up, put down some bark mulch with rock edging.” “Sure,” I said. “Less to mow.” He then headed toward the area with the raised bed. There’s already a dirt path of sorts that cuts around the edge of that bed toward the side where the water faucet is. “And here,” he said, “put some bark mulch here, make a real path.”

In fact I don’t know if this will happen this year, especially the path that requires digging up sod–it might end up being more $$$ than I want to invest in garden projects. But it got me thinking about paths. These would be useful, logical paths, places I already walk regularly, sensible paths.

But I’m intrigued by whimsical paths. I’ve created a few of these over the years although they’ve all ended up overgrown. When I put in the bed in front of the maple in the front yard I made a path curved through the middle. It was partly practical–gave me weeding access–but it was also a path to nowhere and that entertained me. It soon became home to Siberian iris volunteers and is now just part of the bed. There was another path I made into the middle of the circular bed in the front—I even put down paving stones and placed a bird bath in the middle, hidden from view unless you walked along the path–but that path too became overgrown and the bird bath now sits in the back yard.

And this is all an interesting metaphor, of course, for paths through writing—or simply through life.