SAMPLE ESSAY – The River-Fed Stone <--back to main samples page

GARDEN CONNECTIONS

A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the Earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
And let the rich life run to the roots again.
­Robinson Jeffers

The first kiss plants into the soul like a rediscovered love—the touch of soil on fingertips, the pungent loam penetrating our senses and requesting our presence. We recall past outdoor adventures, simpler times, those balmy summer evenings when we plucked half of our suppers from the backyard garden and tasted the energy of life itself with every tantalizing bite. We harken back to daydreams we may have harbored while bees, butterflies and hummingbirds took turns sipping from or pollinating flowers of every color, shape and face while spilling over trellises, walls, edging, fences and other borders they ignored in their paths to the sun. Smiles cross our faces. Noble, imaginative and lofty ideas course our minds. A measure of peace flows through our veins, slowly draining our bodies of their tension and reminding us of life beyond offices, schedules, appointments, highways and the Internet. We’re invited back to the land of simple pleasures, which, unfortunately, feels more and like the Land of Oz as our pace to keep up quickens.

The beauty of the first kiss, the annual visit of oncoming spring and summer to our winterized senses that begs us to renew our vows with the earth, is that we can kiss back—no matter how big or small our available plot of land might be. The other beauty is that, unlike the human variety, the first kiss renews itself every time daylight expands and heralds the onset of gardening season. We get to feel the divine sensation over and over again. In the process, we immerse into one of the greatest connections of mind-body-spirit available: planting, growing and enjoying a garden.

The garden is one of the most celebrated and venerated creations of humanity, an offshoot of one of our most primal desires since our distant ancestors discovered cultivation: to make a specific piece of earth as beautiful, colorful, wild or edible as possible. Gardens appear in shapes, sizes and contents limited only by our imagination: flower gardens, banzai gardens, herb gardens, vegetable gardens, window sill gardens, municipal gardens, show gardens, xeriscaped gardens, rooftop gardens, floating pond gardens, water gardens, hydroponic gardens. They can grace the covers of magazines and travel brochures and sites, such as Portland’s Rose Garden, San Francisco’s Conservatory of Flowers, Vancouver’s Burchardt Gardens or Munich’s English Garden. Or, they can serve as bursts of color and life to their private owner’s eye, as do countless flower and vegetable gardens in plots ranging from indoor containers to multi-acre food gardens that serve several families who pool their resources and helping hands. The garden provides everything we need for physical health and well-being: clean air that continually renews itself, sustenance through the freshest of food, a constant presence of beauty and growth, quietude and serenity, and exercise that can range from strenuous, during preparation and planting, to an effort as mellifluous as tai-chi.

Gardens offer great respite and inspiration for our minds and souls. They represent the living embodiment of a great line from The Kybalion: “Spirit and matter are but two poles of the same thing, the intermediate planes being merely degrees of vibration.” A garden well-appointed with flowers, herbs, vegetables, shrubs and such distinguished guests as birds, butterflies and bees pulls spirit and nature together in a palpable way, and invites us to what ancient yogis called “spirit and nature, dancing together.” Immersed in such a space, which may be as small as 20 x 20 feet yet contain fifty species, we can’t help but be swept away by the processes of growing, birthing, dying, regenerating, pollinating, cross-pollinating and feeding taking place among the plants … or the processes of dreaming, thinking, meditating, contemplating, wandering, creating, walking, sitting, standing or exercising in which we find ourselves. In the garden, moments become participles, moving and describing at the same time. They reflect the active spiritual life. Nothing stands still; everything moves in a direction that bears fruit, even in the dormancy of winter.

Planting season has arrived.
Finally, it’s past: a cold, blustery winter of re-setting fence posts, mixing in mulch, turning over the crimson clover that served as “green manure,” setting old tires for potato hills, moving soil around to create a more level surface, cutting old barn boards into raised bed borders, and eyeballing seed and flower bulb catalogs with the anticipation a musician feels when he or she has just been visited by a perfect opening line and accompanying melody. The sun has warmed the ground, earthworms have aerated the earth, and the horse and donkey have created an abundance of natural fertilizer. Spring bulbs crack the surface, revealing the tips of narcissus, tulips, daffodils.

The mind imagines a veritable heaven-on-earth while sifting through a particular combination from the earth’s 422,000 known varieties that will populate this space. The fingertips tingle in heightened expectation of working the earth, planting seed and facilitating a growth process. The brain plays with little factoids that resonate with the history of civilization itself: The ancestral seeds of those patches of pumpkins and squash fed the ancestors of the Mayans 9,000 years ago. The berry vines preparing to entwine the fenceposts, and ground cover used to nourish the soil during the winter, were known crops in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. And, some 30 centuries ago, the ancestral plants to the horehound, verbena, yarrow, fennel, fenugreek and rosemary now in the ground were used as remedies and elixirs throughout the Mediterranean world, particularly by the pharaohs and physicians of Egypt.

Within a few months, the magical spell of sun, rain, a few full moons and the ever-expanding realm of God — and plenty of hard work, done with devotion—will turn a thousand seeds beneath a quarter-acre plot of soil, decomposed hay, oak, sycamore and hickory leaves, horse manure and chopped-up crimson clover into a lush, resplendent and colorful ecosystem of flowers, shrubs, herbs and vegetables that will simultaneously feed the stomach, eyes and spirit.

The garden looks different than it did the year before—many new species added, a couple dropped, raised beds introduced, many more flowers, a slight increase in size. Yet, its essential vibration is the same: a place to leave the crazy urgency of the world, a place to draw in and be reminded of the flow that animates all living things. The first thing that is noticed while watching the plants inch their way toward the sun, the flowers growing to a point where they show their faces, or the herbs gathering their potency as medicinals or edibles: This flow is slow. It is the flow one experiences with deep prayer, meditation or silent contemplation. It is the same flow that enables us to fall asleep at night having honored one of Dr. Ernest Holmes’ most-taught affirmations, a practice that has been central to the spiritual path since someone first called it “a spiritual path”: “We should daily train our thought to recognize the Spirit in everything we do, say or think.”

Which leads to one of the greatest, most inexhaustible joys of creating and maintaining a garden: Our souls recognize Spirit within every bit of it. Our minds may be a little slow to catch up, especially when we’re breaking our backs to turn soil, catching our hands and fingers on rose thorns, or sweating profusely from four hours of work beneath an early summer sun. However, our deeper senses drink until they’re drunk from the energy of the garden, and our higher minds connect with the Universal Mind that connects and establishes a relationship between all things; in this case, between our gardens and the potential we possess to create and express in a wide variety of ways. Not only that, but the energy we intake by breathing in our gardens, or pinching off a sugar snap pea pod or a piece of lettuce and eating it live, straight from Source, is tremendously healing. All the blossoms, pods, ears, heads, leaves, tubers, fruits, berries, succulents, scents and tastes that the garden produces are just reminders. Ancient Greek scientist Anaxagoras believed that air contained the seeds of all things. Within the constant growing and pollinating of our gardens lies a deep truth about ourselves: We, too, contain the seeds of all things. It is up to us to continually discover and rediscover which seeds will grow when planted in the soil of our life experience and state of preparation, and which will bear fruit when grown by our actions, daily nurturing and deep contemplation or prayer that takes place “beneath the surface.”

The garden accomplishes this through natural selection, coupled with whatever sustenance or hardship the elements provide. When we reach that point, we can simply walk into our indoor or outdoor gardens, or gaze at the flower blossoms in our window sill planters, and experience an exalted state of recognition of Spirit reminiscent of a few wise words from mystical Christian Emmanuel Swedenbourg: “Goodness and love mould the form into their own image, and cause the joy and beauty of love to shine forth from every part of the face.”

Everyone who has walked through a flower garden, slowly, and studied the multi-hued, multi-shaped smiling faces knows this feeling. It is inspiring, energizing, healing. And to think all of those smiling faces originated as seeds and bulbs, some as small as pinheads…who can honestly say that miracles don’t exist anymore? Every time a flower blooms, we witness one.

The Harvest
In the last 10,000 years, no two words have meant more to humankind. The harvest has signified the feeding of communities, the successful culmination of months of hard work, and the ability for civilizations to grow. It has been the source of festivals, dances, ceremonies and great feasts; many American Indian tribes even called the September full moon “Harvest Moon”. Traditionally, the level of sacredness attached to the harvest has only been matched in our society by one annual, single-day event: Christmas.

Unfortunately, things have changed. More recently in our culture, harvest has come to mean the hauling in of massive acreage of corn, soybeans, grains, basic fruits and vegetables by massive agri-business operations working the Great Plains, Midwest, interior Florida, and California’s San Joaquin and Coachella valleys. Each fall, food is harvested, processed and shipped for eventual delivery to our supermarkets and dinner tables. With the small farmer an ever-diminishing part of our society, the backyard garden squeezed out by population increases and overbuilding, and the entire food chain chemicalized and engineered for our fast-paced supermarket convenience, the significance of the harvest has been reduced to a shadow fainter than one cast on winter solstice in the north. Sadly, with that loss has come an accompanying loss of the spirit of our natural relationship with the earth and what it provides us.

That sacred bond returns to those who plant and nurture gardens. We find that, while the big harvest usually comes at the end of summer, every day can serve as a mini-harvest. We can pick a few vegetables for dinner, snack on a tomato while pulling weeds, cut a bouquet of flowers for our loved ones, or pluck sprigs of spearmint or peppermint for the tastiest tea on the planet at that moment. For the caretaker of a healthy, bountiful garden, harvest day can last for four or five months straight, with a few peak days during which berries ripen, ears of corn turn to the side for plucking and roses or orchids blossom. All the digging, mulching, planting, weeding, cultivating, thinning, caretaking and silent interacting have led to this moment: sitting down for dinner with vegetables of four different colors and vases filled with fresh-cut flowers.

Outside, the garden is ripe to overgrowing, a visual that feels like the degree of happiness and satisfaction springing from the heart. Only the changing of the seasons can stop it now. If the garden is in a warm environment, it may not stop at all…just like the potential of our spirits and minds, if we give them a chance to grow and harvest them selectively. Gardens serve as our perpetual reminders.