What you see is what you get

By Susan Geise
Reader Contributor

It happened again, just a few minutes ago. As it often does. Perhaps as it was intended from the start.

At first, I thought I was alone in the Healing Garden. It’s located close to my office and as the BGH volunteer coordinator, I sometimes escape to that special place.

“What you see is what you get,” is a tried-and-true idiom, originally intended to assure someone that they will indeed get what they think they are getting.

But is there another way to think of that phrase? Perhaps shift your emphasis from what we see to what we see. Our senses perceive something, while our mind gives it meaning.

Take our Healing Garden as an example. What do you see when you enter that place? Could it be a metaphor for life?

Let me explain.

The BGH Healing Garden. Photo by Ben Olson.

The sheer diversity of the plants in the garden is astonishing. Hundreds of trees, flowers, shrubs and grasses thrive alongside each other, not to mention coexisting with artifacts of human construction.

The garden is in a perpetual state of change. Every day the flora ebbs and flows, flourishes and fades. So do we. We, too, have our seasons — phases of our lives that stubbornly emerge to seek the light and times of triumph tempered by seasons of struggle. We thrive, produce the promise of the future and ultimately diminish, our work enshrined and our legacy left as a testament to our being.

So time spent in the Healing Garden reveals that its beauty is not in being manicured but its value lies in its bounteous and sometimes unruly abundance. Its value is magnified by the members of our community who tend it with love and attention.

My visits there are nearly always shared with all sorts of folks. Today’s visitors included a grandmother and her very young granddaughter, who carried a very pink purse. We gave each other space to enjoy the garden in relative seclusion, but I lingered to point out to the small girl that not only do those last surviving roses at just her level smell good, they matched her purse exactly. All three of us seemed delighted to realize that.

Were the roses past their prime? Sure. But, maybe so are some of us. Each of us is in an appointed phase, just like the multitude of the flora of the garden. Each of us here inhabits this shared space.

“What you see is what you get,” carries a new meaning for me now. Stop, see, recognize and appreciate the beauty that is glorious in all its imperfections.

As are we all.

Susan Geise is the volunteer coordinator at Bonner General Health.