So much of my life this summer has felt like a game in which I’m aware I’m playing a game, but I have no idea the rules or what is happening on the board.

It helps me to know it’s a game.  It helps me to remember the game didn’t come with a rule book, so I don’t have to feel badly that I lost it.  It helps me to know that we don’t get cash at the beginning of the game, we get cluelessness.

Being clueless and knowing it has its advantages.  It made me look for wise teachers  and by the grace of Divinity, I found some.  Turns out they were whispering in my heart all along.  They were NOT that guy in the mountains.

Relief.

Part of me wants fun beach party bingo as game activities or as one of my spiritual helpers calls, “a personality picnic” all the time, but I listen better when the game’s afoot with mayhem challenges versus non-stop fluffy fun. Though I try to say thank you a lot when I have fun in an effort to change the plot of the game so that more fun is included.

Even when I am begging for answers, my spiritual helpers don’t explain the game fully. Maybe that is one of the rules of the game.  I’ll get the rule book when I don’t need it anymore.

So I go back to the things I know for sure: the  game’s afoot and I have allies.  We all do.

I recently heard someone say that the secret of a happy life was to lower the gratitude threshold.  Maybe THAT is the game???

You see how even when I know that no one is going to tell me the precise nature of the game,  I still ask leading questions.

This summer, the damage the deer are doing is so over the top that its impossible to miss that this is the game of this summer.  This damage is the gift to be grateful for.  Exactly why remains to be seen.

I remind myself that this is as productive a learning summer as two summers ago when the gardens were spilling forth lavish amounts of Flowers for Emily Sheehan’s wedding including the Flowers in these photos.

Meanwhile, this summer, take a look at my bean harvest from our 220′ spiral of bush beans and three bean towers of pole beans.

They were good, all nine of them shared among five of us, but really, did the deer need to eat ALL the rest?

Or look at the Venus Garden.

This garden is the garden where we stick in a twig and a towering specimen of 10,000 Flowers springs up almost overnight. This year it IS twigs as each night the deer come through to make sure not a single leaf stays undamaged and not a Flower bud survives.

So in the spirit of what I think is maybe the game….

I am grateful for the nine beans. Yum!

I am grateful that deer don’t like the taste of Red Shiso.

I am grateful for deer medicine, and we have heaps of it.

I am grateful for Wildflowers like this Titan Orchid that I found on a woodswalk this week, shining its light so strong it positively glowed.

I am grateful for the ways the deer deflate my vanities.

I am grateful that the deer can’t eat my sense of humor.

I am grateful that fall will come then winter and spring, and I will get to begin a new chapter in the game and sow new gardens.  Is this the right time to ask for fewer deer?