Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

May Sarton (1912–1995), a Belgian-born American poet and memoirist, wrote frequently about solitude, daily ritual, and the moral/spiritual lessons of tending a home and garden. In her journals from the 1970s onward—written while she lived in rural New England—gardening becomes both a practical discipline and a metaphor for inner life: attention, waiting, seasonal recurrence, and acceptance of limits. This quotation reflects Sarton's characteristic turn from modern haste toward the “slow circles of nature,” framing the garden as a place where time, weather, and growth impose patience and thereby offer a kind of restorative, almost religious, recalibration.

Sarton argues that impediments—anything that “slows us down” or “sets us back”—can be beneficial because they return us to natural rhythms that human ambition and speed often deny. The garden teaches that growth cannot be forced: it requires waiting, repetition, and responsiveness to conditions beyond our control. Calling gardening an “instrument of grace” elevates this ordinary labor into a spiritual practice. Grace here is not earned by productivity but received through humility and attention: by accepting delay, limitation, and cyclical time, we become more receptive to calm, perspective, and gratitude.