Have you ever had a moment where your heart knew something your mind was trying to hide?
“The heart sees deeper than the eye.”
That was the message hanging from my teabag this morning.
I had just finished harvesting strawberries from the little patch growing beneath one of my potted apple trees. Earlier in the day, I had transplanted oregano cuttings and saved the leaves I trimmed off so they wouldn’t go to waste. It felt like such a small but meaningful victory — nurturing, using, and honoring what I had grown.
To celebrate, I poured myself a cup of sweet tangerine tea into a mug a dear friend had gifted me years ago, when I first became a homeowner during my first marriage. The mug had roses on it.
And suddenly I wondered… how did she know?
Back then, I wasn’t “someone who gardens.” At least, not on the outside.
In fact, it was something I quietly longed for.
I still remember buying a tiny bag of potting soil for 69 cents while living in an apartment during my first marriage. I was excited in the way only someone starved of a dream can understand. I wanted to grow something of my own.
But introducing anything new into the home often came with resistance. The concern was usually cleanliness — dirt, mess, the carpet.
So I hid the bag of soil near the porch door, hoping I could quietly start a plant outside and show that it wasn’t harming anything.
That evening, it led to conflict. The bag was thrown away, and I was insulted for bringing soil into the apartment.
Years later, small permissions came in pieces. Eventually, I was allowed to keep a ponytail palm. Later, during one of my former husband’s trips abroad, I found a dracaena plant on clearance at Kroger for five dollars and brought it home quietly. To my surprise, no one objected. A friend later gifted me a tomato plant, and somehow that was allowed too.
After our son was born and we moved into another home, I finally had access to a small outdoor soil bed. My son was only a few months old, and I remember hauling heavy bags of soil myself while exhausted and sleep deprived. But I was determined.
That little patch gave me my first sunflower.
My first tomato.
The first feeling that something I planted could truly belong to me.
When that marriage ended, I took the tomato plant with me across cities during the move. Cold weather had already started settling in, and I doubted it would survive. Yet one stubborn green tomato remained on the vine through all of it.
Looking back now, that feels symbolic somehow.
Today, more than two decades after that hidden bag of soil, I walk out to my strawberry patch and feel joy in places inside me that once felt unreachable.
This year, I also became the proud caretaker of my first rose bush.
I’ve always loved roses. But I didn’t realize how deeply I wanted to grow one until now.
Maybe that’s what the teabag message meant.
Sometimes our deepest dreams stay hidden even from ourselves while we are busy surviving.
And how did my friend know the right mug to pick back then? Maybe certain people can see parts of us before we can see them clearly on our own.
Maybe the heart really does see deeper than the eye.
If this reflection resonated with you, I explore these themes more deeply in my book Divine Detox: Healing with Love — where I write about healing, inner childhood wounds, and the quiet ways we return to ourselves.
When has your heart known what your mind was trying to hide?
