19/10/2020
🎃Garden metaphor
Few things are as beautiful as a thriving garden, I reckon. There’s the obvious attraction of the senses, but deep down, there’s the metaphor that applies to us all. We cultivate our lives in a cyclical manner. Planting the seeds is an intricately connected process of adhering to the conditions we face, our current state of mind, our visions for what’s to come and the actions and choices we make each day.
I’ve spend many an hour in the garden. It was run down but I decided to revive it in a slow, methodical manner. I had a rough plan - a spatial alignment and a set of crops I wished to plant. Having a mother who’s spent the majority of her life as a gardener, I had a few ideas, but mostly, I learned the value of slowing down my own mind and allowing patience and a keen eye to move with the flow of the garden. Trust the plants, I kept telling myself. Trust that nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
The weather, the slugs, the mould, the soil acidity, the weeds… all factors beyond my preference, yet characteristics that cannot be separated from the life of a gardener. The vision of what I imagine to be a beautiful garden - like that of or the cover of any Garden magazine - became assimilated into the felt sense of joy seeing the stages of growth and decay. We as humans, after all, are only doing the same.
As I harvest the final crops of the season - still have carrots and celery to go - I reflect on what it is to sow the seeds of life. It’s an embodiment of a deeper process of becoming more human. To see happiness and wellbeing not only in those moments with a belly full of plump berries and late summer sun lighting up your patch as if specifically intended for your prized crop. But to adjust and adapt to how our nature changes and is a shared phenomenon - a space to dwell but also to rejoice in the mystery of what we think may control, and what actually lays before us - just a unique opportunity to be with nature.
