It is delight

This is what you need to understand:  At times it kills you.  It is hot, hard, blistery.  It fails, and at the last moment too, after lots of hard work and hope.  Or right at the beginning, gut punch, feels like you can't even get up.  It is hot and your back hurts too.  And it is slow -- two hours turns into four.  Nothing works quite right.

But here is what else you need to understand:  It keeps you alive.  Not just in the physical sense, not just in the health sense, but in the real sense, the spiritual sense:  ALIVE.  It is family.  It is personal.  It is meaningful.  It is challenging.  It is rewarding.  It is risky.  It is beautiful.  It is love.

It is LOVE.  It is love but not "oh you are so wonderful" love: it is love bedrock, got your back, will tell you when you are wrong, will risk your wrath as well as your joy love.

It is reclaiming 20 feet of rectangle garden in which to plant four rows of sweet corn and sweating and sitting in the shade and getting dizzy and drinking water and breaking your back and straightening out your back and watching the buzzards wheel wondering if they are waiting for you to fall over and working and resting with each other in that work and rest dance that you do and thinking about ice cream and sweet corn and bears and beans and corn bread for supper and finding two tiny terrapins in the tilling.  And a baby red salamander in the potatoes.

It is delight.  In your heart and in your fellow travelers' voices and eyes.