There is a picture that hangs on the wall. It’s a picture of an old cabin with the setting sun reflecting on the windows as if the lights are still on. It looks so cozy and welcoming. The fall birds are wending their way across the sky but if you look more closely you see the age of the dock and the boat tied beside it, well weathered from storms and from time. The title of the picture is Passing Through. A poignant, sentimental commentary on our journey here in the garden.  
Flipping through the newspaper, I come on the obituary of someone I had never met but someone I knew second hand.  He was 92 and a line from the obit said “He predicted weather precisely by observing animals, birds , trees and nature.” For years someone I know would stop on the street to ask this old man his take on the weather and I would get to hear his predictions second hand, be able to watch for them and wonder just how he knew. Now I know, he knew the Garden and the Garden keeper, how the garden was connected to the birds and the animals and to us. He predicted what is often said to be unpredictable despite the modern technology we have today. He showed us that if we are observant we can see what seems to be invisible, the invisible direction behind all that is. He was just passing through.

All of us are just passing through and we, like this man, have been given gifts to decipher what is written in the air around us. Do you know what your gift is and how to use it? If you know what it is, do you use it?  If it were your obituary, would it tell as much about you as this man’s did? We tend to take for granted our sojourn here in the garden, lustfully looking into the future , not so much as to understand the director or to further understand life and our part in it, but more to fulfill our own wants and needs. Most often we pass through leaving only the artifacts of our existence, the  remains –old boats tied to docks. But what if we passed through like the fall birds or like this old man, watching the weather, knowing the garden we are in and  knowing that when our time here has come to an end, that we are on our way to somewhere else- another garden somewhere perhaps one that is just awakening to spring.