I AM GARDEN AND GARDENER TOO

Then, it was a wasteland of scarred Earth, with outcrops of rubble and rubbish, and lumps of manmade junk. She emerged from the man made metallic ringing of the delivery room.

The first Spring, the Gardener came out and moved and shaped Earth to make the first patch of soft growing grass for the infants crawling limbs to explore. And Daffodils to delight.

The first Autumn brought a pair of apple trees, symbols of love and fruitfullness for the garden. Then blackthorn, whitethorn, holly and beech to mark the inner and outer of this little world as the child's legs strengthened and wandered, and hawthorn to signal, with its white blossom, the hope of the coming Summer.

In the second Spring birch and elder, ash, hazel and Oak were invited in to add their symbolic qualities of healing and rebirth, divination , magic, and furze exploded its Spring Sun of colour and scent.

That Summer saw the arrival of the massed magic of herbs, for taste, for scent, for healing, for bees, for beauty. Shrubs for a child to roll through and absorb their sudden fragrance.

As Winter emerged into another Spring space was made for secret creeping ivies, bluebells, bursts of primroses, and violets. The child is there now. The Gardener thinks it time to ask this Earth to produce something to eat. The vegetable garden is made with the fruit of the sea-heaps of glistening, diverse seaweeds. What delicious pleasure to sit munching between rows of peas, and then foraging for strawberries and blackcurrants - such bounty.

Then it is Autumn. The Gardener sets a bench between honeysuckle and fuchsia and she sits to watch the evening sky change over the roof-tops.

Another Winter bleak, barren, salt burned, wind flattened. Endless days looking out at the static garden, nothing changes. Its shapes passively absorb the sky's Winter lights and become dramatic, elegant, timid in turn. But nothing turns within. The Gardener looks out, she sees her life path lying in a closed circuit of learning and forgetting, finding and losing, growing and dying, like the seasons turn and return.

Then the Garden stirs again and seeps its secrets in through her senses. Smell the change! The variety of bergamont and lavender and cut grass. Finger the new green buds and shoots. Hear the altered sound of the wind stirring the new leaves. Taste chives, mint lemon balm and look! This is not a replay of last Spring. Look how the composition of apple, holly and flax has altered and matured, how the hazel's branches now provide that thrush with a perch. Look how last year's timid bluebells and primroses are rampaging down the bank. Look for and welcome unplanned visitors, which, as wind blown seeds, have found a wholesome place. Anticipate the growing abundance of fruit later, and perhaps this year or next a hazelnut. Like a dream-time ancient the child moves through it all solemnly telling everything its name.

This garden is becoming more and more. Garden and Gardener have embarked on a spiral journey, moving in a conjunction of seasonal return work, resolution, ordered patterns with chaotic fringes and singular spaces where prayer works and spirit plays. This whole composition, Garden and Gardener too, is striving in its winding way towards Beauty more Beauty.

"What shall I do with the body that has been given me, so much at one with me, so much my own?

For the calm happiness of breathing, for the joy of being alive, tell me where should I be grateful ?

I am Garden and Gardener too, and unalone in this vast dungeon.

My breath, my glow you can already see on the window-pane of eternity.

A pattern is imprinted there, unknown till now.

Let muddle die down, the sediment flow out-the lonely pattern cannot be crossed out."

~~~~~~ Navigation ~~~~~~

Home | Articles | Starsigns | Contacts | Recycling | Links | E-mail