Forgiving others is easier when I remember that I'm human and stupid, too.

There must be a few times in life when you stand at a precipice of a decision. When you know there will forever be a Before and an After...I knew there would be no turning back if I designated this moment as my own Prime Meridian from which everything else would be measured.

Come on, don't you ever stop and smell the coffee?

Wait!" What?" I lowered my cup hastily, wondering if maybe there was a stray hair, or worse, a newly boiled bug inside my cup. You got to smell it first. It's the proper way to cup coffee." Cup coffee?" Taste it." What? Are you the coffee police or something?

What swells inside me is a love so boundless, I am the sunrise and sunset. I am Liberty Bell in the Cascades. I am Beihai Lake. I am every beautiful, truly beautiful, thing I've ever seen, captured in my personal Geographia, the atlas of myself.

Let the glossy spreads have their heart-stopping, head-turning kind of beauty. Give me the heart-filling beauty instead. Jolie laide, that's what I would choose. Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.

That's exactly why nature always trumps gardens. Gardens are just reality pruned of chaos. What doesn't work you rip out.