It is the Flower Moon of the year, the time when the sun warms the earth and the roses bloom. As it happens, I am also in what I would call the Flower Tide of my life. I used to think that the Flowering was an effortless opening, something that would gradually happen, like a single rose bud opening. I'm a little older now, and wiser. The Flower Tide is not that easy.

A single rose might gently open its heart to the warmth of the sun and never shrink back. But for the whole rose bush it's a different story. A wild rose grows in our garden climbing up a tree and producing a cascade of bright pink roses every summer. The roses grow in clusters and form a gorgeous wall of strong pink. Every day, buds open. But every day, a rose sheds its petals and dies.

This time of the year, near Midsummer, the whole world seems to flourish in a celebration of green with flowers of many colours. From a distance, it looks like a single opening up, a single reaching for the sun that only fades as autumn approaches. But when you look at it more closely, you see that every day the earth gives birth, but every day life also lets go and is absorbed back into the soil. The tide of summer is not a single, simple one. It contains many ebbs and flows.

So why should I expect my life to be any different? I used to expect myself to have an easy time of it in this tide of my life. When things seemed difficult, I would blame myself and think I wasn't doing it right somehow. But of course, as the wild rose shows me, it's unrealistic to expect a constant flowering. Nobody is on a high all the time. There are ebbs and flows in a human life, just like in nature. It is natural to have off days - even the odd off week. And I'm not doing it wrong. I am simply living my life.

So often, I get frustrated because things don't work out the way I expect. Even little things can disappoint me. Like days when I don't get done what I expected to achieve. Or I get stressed anticipating what might happen next. One of the things I am learning is to stay in the moment and not to expect anything. It makes for a much more peaceful life.

Accepting life as it comes is a very important lesson for me. Just to live in the moment and to give up fighting against what is. If I feel down, I can just be with that and breathe. Just sitting out in the garden, in the beauty of nature, and noticing the breeze, the birds, and those pink roses, is enough for that down feeling to seem much less important. And by not expecting anything from the future, it is much easier to be surprised by life and simply enjoy it.

I'm not saying any of this comes easily to me. It is a slow learning process. I don't even expect it'll ever be my natural way of being. But it is important to make the choice to be in my life as it happens, here and now.