The Angels’ Message, and My Father’s Presence in the Garden

A half hour before my angel card reading, around 6:30 in the evening, I was out in my front gardens planting new shrubs and flowers. The light had settled into that soft, end‑of‑day glow, the kind that makes everything feel a little quieter, a little more honest. As I pressed each plant into the soil, my father drifted into my thoughts, not because I reached for him, but because something in the earth seemed to call him forward.

“Where the earth spoke first.”

My dad loved to garden; it was one of the places where his pride lived. Years ago, when he was still here in the United States, before retiring back to São Miguel, he would come to my house early in the morning and tend to my gardens as if they were his own. I would wake up and look outside, and there he would be, trimming a tree or kneeling in the flower beds, completely absorbed in the quiet work of caring for something. He even kept a pair of “garden pants” in my shed, changing into them like a man reporting for duty. That memory still makes me smile.

So as I planted those flowers that evening, it felt natural that he would appear in my mind. What surprised me was the feeling that followed, a soft warmth, almost like he was standing just behind me, checking my spacing, approving my choices, reminding me that tending the earth is its own kind of prayer. It was gentle, grounding, familiar.

And then, not long after, I sat down for the angel card reading.

Three cards were drawn: Ariel, and two from Azrael.

Ariel, the angel of nature and flowers and courage, the one who whispers through the earth itself.
Azrael, the angel of transition and release and emotional healing, appearing twice, as if to underline what needed to be heard.

The woman reading the cards told me my ancestors had been protecting me from dark energy; she said they knew the last couple of years had been heavy, heavier than I allowed myself to say. She told me the darkness had passed, that I was an “earth angel,” that flowers were part of my healing, that I receive messages in my sleep and should write them down. She said my ancestors were close.

At the time, I listened, unsure how to take it all in. But when she mentioned flowers, something inside me shifted, because I had just been in the garden, thinking of my dad, feeling him near. It was as if the earth had spoken first, and the cards simply echoed what had already begun.

And suddenly, the pieces found each other.

The flowers, the soil, my father’s hands, the ancestors, the heaviness of the last few years, my parents’ failing health, my dad’s passing in April of 2025, the way grief fractured our family into separate corners. Even now, as some of us begin to talk again, the conversations feel careful and tentative, but hopeful in their own quiet way.

Maybe the reading was not about angels in the literal sense; maybe it was about the way love lingers in the places where we once stood together. Maybe it was about the way grief rearranges us, the way nature steadies us, the way healing begins in the smallest moments, like planting a flower and feeling your father’s presence in the evening air.

As I watered the last plant that night, before any cards were drawn, I felt something loosen inside me, a quiet release, a sense that the chapter of darkness really is closing. The awkwardness between siblings feels less like distance and more like the first fragile step toward mending.

“Carrying forward what was planted in me.”

Ariel’s earth,
Azrael’s release,
my father’s quiet pride,
my family’s slow return to one another,
my own stained‑glass window shifting again, catching the light in a new way.

Maybe the message was simple;
keep planting, keep healing, keep listening,
the pieces are finding their place.