5
" What if even then, God had plans for a second garden? Another tree, and another chance to reach out and accept the abundance of life? What if in Eden, God was planning Gethsemane?"
The question echoed through Lucy, growing in power with each reverberation within her soul.
She held a flower in her hands. The sweet, exotic perfume floated deep into Lucy's heart---carrying Ms. Beth's words right along beside it. Lucy hesitated, allowing the words to take effect. "Are you circling a closed Eden, or have you chosen to step into Gethsemane, through the open gate?"
Lucy blinked. She had never thought of it like that.
"Maybe what you thought was a closed gate meant to punish you is actually God's way of protecting you from remaining in a place where you won't and can't receive His life."
The truth washed Lucy's heart with color. As it brushed over the harsh edges with water, watercolor blooms began to blend one into the other, filling her with understanding.
Lucy's heart swelled as the long-dry soil soaked up this water.
"Where you're preoccupied with your failures and your fears and the desire to preserve all you might lose, God has a plan to preserve something else. To root you in a place where life can grow within you once more, freely and abundantly. A garden of death for a garden of life, where through His own resurrection Jesus returns all that was stolen. "
― Ashley Clark , Paint and Nectar (Heirloom Secrets, #2)
7
" For now, she would dance among the garden.
When azaleas bloom in winter.
When hurricanes come in fall.
Maybe the paint was not so much these out-of-season moments, but more what was growing in between them. The clumsy grasp to keep summer's blooms in winter would inevitably fail. And yet hope always came rising up, resurrected from the frozen ground.
For as garden turns to garden, flowers turn to dust, and glory goes to glory, the changes are within us.
And maybe beauty's greatest achievement isn't in the staying... but that in its return, again and again, it paints the eternal---all the beautiful things that will never fade. "
― Ashley Clark , Paint and Nectar (Heirloom Secrets, #2)
9
" Contentment and joy and grief all blurred together---and in a way, Eliza had become the color. And the world, the water, so that all the pieces of her blended in unexpected ways as the canvas was turned a little to the left, a little to the right, and the pink dripped down into the blue, down into the yellow, down into the brown, and so on; life and loss and harvest from season to season. A garden's blooms, continually returning for another encore until the circularity of it all becomes in itself a promise through the winter and the spring and the summer and the fall. Always turning, always returning color to the ground and color to the sky. "
― Ashley Clark , Paint and Nectar (Heirloom Secrets, #2)
15
"
Spring 1930
The wind whipped the little white flowers from the pear tree outside Eliza's window overlooking the garden. The flowers would not bloom again this spring.
The racket those branches made was too much to sleep through, so Eliza slipped her wrap around her silken chemise and wandered over toward the window. The garden outside was dark. The garden, once so full of hope and promise, would look different in the morning, after the storm finished ravaging what was left of the February blooms.
But she had already, of course, fallen in love with a different season after her mother and grandmother died in the summer. She had already adopted February over June. So she would simply have to do that again: to tell her heart to see the beauty in March or April or May.
The problem, of course, occurred when the wind roared and the rains flooded everything.
Nothing about this was the way she'd planned.
There was nothing wrong with Robert. There was just nothing right about him either. But why would she pine for the man who'd left her behind? Why, in such uncertain times, should she cease to keep living... so preoccupied by a dream?
Maybe she could find a new dream. And she always had her love for painting, so that was something, at least. When the nectar fell from the trees, she would paint it by memory. "
― Ashley Clark , Paint and Nectar (Heirloom Secrets, #2)
19
" Eliza marveled at the pattern of the veins on the leaves, of the leaves themselves along the branches of the tree---of their falling, then growing once more. Maybe that's one reason she loved her garden so dearly---for while she despised change, she took comfort that nature would always bring another season, another breath, another opportunity. Nature would keep going long after she ceased to be. While perhaps fatalistic, she found peace in remembering she was not at the center of everything nor was she the fulcrum upon which goodness and beauty hinged. Rather, she was, perhaps, their bloom---and bloom she would, gladly. "
― Ashley Clark , Paint and Nectar (Heirloom Secrets, #2)
