| |
Gardening:
Good for our Soul
by Peter Cock
Photo by Belinda Towns
Introduction
Probably most of us have been in a garden on a particular day and time
and felt a rush of wellbeing- of joy, being recharged, uplifted, a sense
of healing, being in tune with the infinite. I hope that through sharing
my perspective on spirituality and wellbeing in the garden this will assist
in clarifying your own.
 A
garden is usually defined as ‘a piece of ground appropriated to the
cultivation of Herbs, Plants, Fruit, Flowers or Vegetables’. It can
be much more. Gardens can clear away the fog of the noisy, fast, techno
world, and the mindless focus on the clutter of trivia. This trivia hides
us from what matters and what we need to be in relationship to each other,
to being alive to our being and becoming and, in the larger picture, being
alive to the earth. We all have our issues, our edges to expand or contract.
And we need all the help we can get. Gardening attunes us to life’s
struggles for renewal, richness and balance. Dimensions of healing, psychological
development and physical wellbeing are all part of the spirit of gardening.
For example, gardening every day and through the seasons keeps us in touch
with the cycle of life- we can see plants each day through our seasons
that are thriving, dying, seeding, fruiting, healthy and battling with
disease.
In contrast, gardening books, in their content and categorisation, are
separated from ecology and separated again from spirituality. Here I am
addressing each as part of the others. It is important to carry with us
the awareness of gardens as part of a continuum of our nature connections
- for example bush walking, surfing in wild places, being down on the
farm. Spirituality in the garden in its largest sense refers to the diverse
manifestations of the earth’s life forces. This is expressed in the
Old Testament, as the Garden of Eden. This garden includes all the species,
habitats, climates, and geology etc that go to make up the earth’s
garden. In particular this encompasses wild places, which we visit and
seek to protect but in whose evolution we were not an active partner.
It includes places other than domestic gardens, such as organic farms,
where the focus is on growing food for sale rather than your own family’s
consumption or enrichment.
The ecology of gardens is ideally one of partnership between humans and
the rest of nature. I am focused here on gardens we as humans have consciously
co- created. Gardens are important because they are our personal connections
with nature, they remind us that we are part of nature and cannot live
fully without her. They also remind us that now the rest of nature needs
our assistance, our partnership for the regeneration of the earth.
Each garden has different capacities to evoke spiritual experience. This
is more obvious in the grand experience of sunrise and sunset, in large
powerful naturescapes of desert, mountains and sea. The spiritual capacity
of gardens is more subtle, intricate and human shaped in places where
we are co partners in their creation. Through our gardens we have the
opportunity to bring spiritual experience into our everyday lives rather
than leaving it to church on Sunday or to the grand desert or sea journey.
What we bring to gardening
People from a gardening family or with gardening cultural heritage, or
those who have experienced a ‘fall’, often know they need healing
and are more likely to be open to the capacity of gardening to cultivate
their wellbeing. Those of us running flat out in the fast lane, full of
their power and sense of autonomy are often blinded and disabled from
spiritual attunement.
To consciously cultivate wellbeing, rather than leave it to the unconscious
or live in an unaware state, we need to research and observe ourselves.
What attitudes, values and assumptions do we bring to it? Why are we coming
to the garden? To work, to play, to listen, to rest, regenerate, for time
out from the everyday world, for time with non-human nature, to give and
receive? More important what do we bring? - How much time, how often,
in what frame of mind? How open are we to learning, listening, observing?
Do we come with an attitude of partnership with the rest of nature, to
be of service to life or to control and dominate and demand returns? Are
we there to have a quick visit, do some work or to lingeringly meditate,
observe, create, touch, feel, and wonder?
Gardening as a Partner
Consider what you bring to the partnership and what the rest of nature
brings. Gardening as a partner with the rest of nature means we have to
let go of control to allow the garden to do its magic and as a consequence
transcend our obsessions with mind. We also need space within and time
off from without for the garden to work its magic. Gardening being good
for the soul happens to us not only because of our willingness and openness.
It is as much about the power of the garden as it is about what we do,
bring, think and feel. How difficult we find it to focus on what we are
looking at in the garden, to see only the detail of a flower, instead
of being concerned about what we think or feel about it and then rushing
to do something to it.
There is a tension between creating and being created. Garden writing
focuses on the garden as subject and us as garden creators, managers,
and designers with green fingers. By inflating our role we diminish our
attunement to the experience of ourselves as the subject and the garden
as grower of soulfulness. Seeing ourselves as if we were a plant that
the garden grows helps developing humility in the face of life’s
story. So we need to be mindful of a partnership between us as servants
of the garden and us as the subject of service- our giving and receiving
is an ebb and flow between both.
When we allow ourselves to see the garden more in its own terms, to reach
beyond ourselves to the garden, then we become more one with it, and no
longer standing outside and above. To allow attunement to the processes
of co-creation through gardening, it can help to symbolise this through
providing space, such as a seat for sitting and soaking up lessons of
the garden. In particular, the garden remind’s us about the truth
about being alive on this planet- that we are born, we live, we die as
does the circle of all life on the earth- we are part of nature, and interdependent
with it.
The honouring of the power of the rest of nature might appear to be suggesting
that therefore gardens should be full of weeds as they, rather than being
a plant out of place, are also a plant out of control. They are plants
that show us nature’s power but also threaten to take over and create
a monoculture because of a disturbance we have created. We therefore have
no choice now, but to explore partnership with the rest of nature.
This partnership includes all of nature and all of ourselves. We more
readily acknowledge a place for conscious attunement through, for example,
sitting still, meditating, and being in one’s special place in your
garden to heighten consciousness of soul connections. I am wary of limiting
spirituality in the garden to designed spiritual places and/or sacred
plants within a garden. While we often have preferences for special places
to sit and meditate, they are best seen within a large sense of spirituality
in the garden. Likewise we usually have our favoured plants, those with
special meaning. The inspiration of spirit, and becoming in tune with
the infinite often comes in unexpected places, at unexpected times. These
are free gifts from the garden and not dependent on what we make happen.
We tend to understate the importance of our unconscious and overstate
the role of disciplined consciousness as the path to soulfulness. As co-gardeners
we need to acknowledge the unconscious healing and spiritual attunement
that comes out of making a contribution to the garden. The constantly
repetitive tasks requiring minimal awareness and small energy enable our
right brain to be responsive to the left field. Chopping wood and carrying
water are examples offering equivalent opportunities.
Co-gardening includes you, your needs and your cultural history. Most
of us contribute roots from some other place to the process of growing
our roots here. Therefore to be true to ourselves means our gardens often
reflect where we have come from as well as where we are. So some of us
need more color in our lives than that which Australian plants can. To
be good for our soul, gardens need to not only honor the power of the
more than human in nature, but also who we are and from where we have
come. Our gardens are then more likely to consist of a mixture of plants
from all over the world; no problem if we have done our homework about
what they are and the nature of their power.
The Pleasures and Pains of Gardens
It is often far easier to speak on the surface of the aches and pains
than the joy and self-transcendence of gardening. The deeper pain of losing
a plant you have nurtured has not cultural space for it’s owning
or sharing. Our culture doesn’t seem to want to liberate us from
its one-sided expressions of the interdependencies between pain and pleasure.
However before we begin to wax on about the joys of gardening, it is important
that spirituality in the garden is grounded and sensual, enabling its
manifestation in earthy pursuits.
Often we have to garden or walk the dog when we least feel like it - yet
these necessary calls of nature can keep us fit in spite of ourselves.
We can provide ourselves with a sense of meaning from being both a service
to life and in partnership with it. However, we can allow our dutiful
gardening to become oppressive of us if, for example, we become obsessive
about it and try to make it perfect with all lines straight and all weeds
eradicated. ‘Gardening until we drop’ deprives us of time out
to rest, reflect and plan in the garden for the garden and for ourselves.
If anything we tend to over-garden, work the ground too hard, and try
to maximize productivity. In the name of love we risk killing the garden
through excessive interventions. For example, if plants are overfed and
watered, they become more dependent on our interventions, so that when
we go away are less able to survive. Give them the minimum, so that they
can draw more deeply from the earth, and become resilient. With this in
mind we are allowing for a partnership- a two-way flow.
The Garden as Soul Guide
Spirituality at its core means the breath of life. The Latin root is ‘spiritus’
meaning breath, vigour. It is about being attuned to the essences of life
through the experience of self-transcendence and synergy with the life
of US that is in tune with the infinite. By Us I mean that of all species
on earth. By spirituality I mean the experience of being aware of being
part of the energy of and for life. By the infinite, the Webster Dictionary
says ‘extending beyond measure or comprehension"- the spirit
of the infinite is the breath of life that exists before us and after
us, that is in us, flows through us and transcends us.
Our soul isn’t just a residue of an unexplained, unknown self-a kind
of god of the gaps between what we know and what we don’t. It relates
to the ground of our being. The core or essence of who we are as human
earthlings and the central issues that matter and connect us to life and
death. Being soulful enables us to be integrated as persons and attuned
to the larger whole of which we are a part. The Webster Dictionary on
soul says, "the part of one’s being that is thought of as the
centre of feeling, thinking, will etc apart from the body". Soulful
means to be full of deep feeling. A soulful person is one attuned to the
being and becoming of their person and their role as part of the larger
universe of life. Soulfulness has of its very essence fuzzy boundaries.
Being full of soul means being full of feeling in a way that reaches beyond
one’s boundaries of self, even our humanity, to feeling connected
to the aliveness of the universe.
Spirituality in the garden is more about access to experience rather than
worry about belief. This is a spirituality that is accessible through
openness to reach for partnership with that which is more than I, through
the apparent otherness of nature. As the Bible says ‘he makes me
lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, He restores
my soul.’ Christ’s journey of forty days and forty nights in
the desert or the American Sioux Indian Vision Quests are traditions that
draw on wild places to facilitate attunement to the larger universe of
life, to clear away the fog of everyday life that clutter and marginalise
core life meanings.
Spirituality is also available in the garden through observation of everyday
life and death- a chance to see your own life cycle through time and at
this point in time through observation of what is happening in the garden.
We can consciously and unconsciously draw on the cycles of nature to attune
to our own position in the life cycle and what is needed to work on for
our becoming. Aspects of particular plants and flowers may call us, draw
us to them and may be a source of personal insight into our growing edge.
This can be activated through being aware of being attracted to particular
plants, for example. These may have a message for you through considering
the particular characteristics of that which attracts you and then mirroring
those attributes back to yourself as a stimulus for self-affirmation.
Alternatively such awareness can serve as a vehicle for a more critical
consideration of our growing edges, of that which we could work on to
become more in balance (see Roszak: 1995).
What kind of garden is more likely to facilitate access to spiritual experience?
How is the garden viewed?
Is it seen as an extension of the house- taking the house out into the
garden rather than bringing the garden into the house? A house-scaped
garden focuses on its built form with a tendency towards monocultural
beauty that is diligently planned- a blaze of one or two colours as illustrated
by TV programs’ backyard blitz with their gardens in a day. What
a contradiction creating a garden in a day. How quickly the garden fashion
of the moment becomes dated and we become dependent on the gardening consultant
to advise on the latest garden fad. An assumption from backyard blitz
that needs to be challenged is that a good garden is made through professional
design, brawn and money.
Key barriers to access to spirituality in Australia are excessive order
and control. Design comes out of our right brain, the linear ordered side
of us. This is great for processing our experience but when dominate gets
in the way of access to spirituality. Formal gardening designs are often
more fashion driven rather than nature driven. The over designed, manufactured,
managed garden is a pretence to the realties of life and is suppressive
of their capacity to access and cultivate our experience of soul full
ness.
We need to be constrained by history, relationships, so that our voice
in the garden is made of many but one and that we listen to the other
voices. This calls us to carefully observe, and come to know how our plants
respond to climate, the earth, and water, our hands. We aren’t perfect
or always rational so why should we try and make the rest of nature so?
Our consciousness loves contrast, for we are complex beings and need difference
to heighten our awareness. Therefore, while there is a place for order
and brightness, so too for chaos, wildness and softness.
What not to do?
Rip out the existing garden the week after you take possession of your
new house? Rather sit, observe its character and research its history,
its microclimate. Yes, change it to make it your own, but not exclusively
so. Honour if possible its ancestors, keep some of the plants that others
and the rest of nature have provided.
Recognition of and a place for the elements.
All gardens have air and earth. The addition of a water feature is increasingly
popular for good reasons. Blocking out the sounds of the city by adding
another voice actively aids our own reflection and relaxation. Water lubricates
all of our being, not just our bodies. Likewise we can include the influence
of fire, symbolized through the role of light such as through solar powered
soft lights, and candles to symbolise the flicker of life and its vulnerability.
A barbecue and a brazier also introduce the fire element, while others
might consider a fire circle around which people may gather. For example,
our cluster of neighbours shares a rock fire circle surrounded by log
seats, which are used for gatherings and sometimes
rituals or celebrations.
Evoking Senses of Wildness
Being wild means that which is not under human control and has its own
life force. Basic to cultivating spirituality in your garden is allowing
space for the voice of nature’s power (see Bruchardon: 1998). Use
wild places to inform your design work. Beyond that we need to be wary
of giving ourselves too much power in design. We can however aid human
receptivity to spiritual experience by providing for a sense of mystery,
for the unknown of which we only have glimmers. It is the unexpected of
nature that helps to keep us present. Through for example, the use of
curves, and the small intimate hidden space that is around the corner.
The paradox of being at least partly lost or unsure leaves open the door
to left field and right brain. The less space you have the harder this
is. You may have to really get down on your knees to observe the wildness
in the soil or look up to the sky if your area is very small.
The more we intervene and attempt to substitute for the rest of nature,
the more we have to do the work and the less nature can be a partner with
us. This is why I don’t like plants in pots on windowsills and especially
minimised plants as they symbolise the ultimate in human domination. Corporate
gardeners that bring in to the high rise or the office building large
pot plants and then six months latter take them away half dead, is offensive
to partnership gardening. I know of an example of a rich lady living in
well to do apartments in the city, equipped with the latest roof top garden
but forbidden by the rules to sit in the garden. How can we expect such
‘garden’ to be a powerful source of spirit when this capacity
for life is so restricted? Yet, this is all that some have access to.
Any garden is better than none. But let us not pretend that all gardens
are equal in terms of their capacity for soul.
A soul garden is one where the forces of nature are more powerfully evident
than our own power. This is honoured and expressed for example through
plants that regenerate, and are thereby not as dependent on humans for
their existence. These are often labelled as weeds. In our vegetable patch
I am the berries person. I like raspberries because they regenerate. We
have a large neighbourhood patch that is a mixture of berries that basically
grow wild- there is chaos. At harvest time we make new paths through the
patch. Another example is from our house garden, which sits on the edge
of the forest in a clearing. The garden is in some powerful senses an
extension of the forest- for the forest reaches through the tree ferns
and other gum trees that have established themselves. This isn’t
to say that we don’t make choices and that some have been added while
others are taken out. Some of the trees were local indigenous planted
by my students and Sandra and me; others have self-sown and been allowed
to mature. There is a dance between the power of the forest and us. This
is very different from a new fashion, which calls for a wild patch alongside
tame ones. Wildness is not just another niche within a garden.
Designing for soul
Think and reflect on yourself and your needs. Then consciously put them
aside and go and observe wild places and thereby allow for both the voice
of you and the rest of nature and then consider how you can be partners.
To allow for the voice of wildness design so that you allow for the voice
of change, chaos and contrast. For example provide for curves and links
versus bits and pieces, with no rigid formula of numbers or rules, rather
a provision for randomness. Take notice of what you might call ‘odd’
ideas, or visions that might come in your dreams or the spaces between
them.
Design a garden that also allows opportunity for plants to make their
contribution to the shape and life of the garden. Not over-designed. Allow
space for each plant’s character to have a voice in shaping the garden.
This will then mean they are not continually pruned to fit.
Design a place where the human hand and technology is minimised, not only
to save labour but also to free up the power of the rest of nature to
have its voice. How easy it is with today’s powerful technology of
the backhoe and bulldozer, to rip out everything and how hard to constrain
our interventions, especially if you are like me and love to landscape.
Choose
plants that:
• Honour and illustrate all our seasons.
• Reflect the full cycle of life. For example leave some dead branches
and plants, don’t rush to replace a sickly plant.
• Predate you and will outlive you if given half a chance- this helps
to locate you in and through time and the cycles of life and so able to
act as a vehicle for self transcendence.
• Honour the history of the bioregion and respond to climate, elements,
topography, for example a local tree that doesn’t require watering.
• Honour your relationships – by including well-loved plants
of well-loved people both alive and dead and of course gifts from the
garden of significant others.
It
is important that you do some of the work directly, but by all means have
helpers. I worry about a garden being merely the product of paid labour-
you may have the money but whose garden is it? Minimize the need to intervene
not just to save labour and water but also to allow the plants their own
expression to be who and where they are thus freeing you to be in the
garden as much as do in it. Design for permacultures, with minimal pruning
and weeding- work less so that you can connect more at a soul level.
Less than 4% of our work force is involved in agriculture but so many
more are at the hobby, self-production level. So a design that facilitates
growing some, even a very little of your own food, and also medicine,
is important for dissolving alienation from the earth. Planting, harvesting,
eating keeps our spirituality grounded and honouring of body and soul
as part of and partner with the earth.
To generate authenticity, design gardens that are part of and honour your
local place through the use of local materials. For example, we had rocks
all over the place from the house excavation, which have been used to
terrace a herb garden and water feature.
Design a garden that is beautiful, of diverse colour, shapes and heights.
This nevertheless is only a surface quality. Contrasts are vital for being
aware, as are the colours that resonate with you. So self-knowledge is
important in terms of comfort zones and knowing what stimulates your growth
and honours your being and your development.
Social and cultural aspects
We garden for our well being –physical, emotional and spiritual.
This is achieved more when we include the interests of others- such as
growing more to share. What a joy it is to share a meal with friends,
some of which has been home grown.
We need gardens that are shared with human others as well as have space
for private encounter- so that our experience of spirituality is a social
experience as well as an individual journey. This includes cuttings and
plants from friends’ gardens so there is an active connection between
the people and places that matter. Create a sacred, social garden by choosing
a place where some or all the ashes of a loved one can be buried or spread.
To counter the loss of space with the intensification of the city we need
to look at sharing spaces. Community gardens need to move from being an
assorted collection of private plots grouped together to those that include
common areas with space for wildness, for permacultures and for encouragement
of wild life.
The social aspect includes connections with species other than plants,
so increase the richness of your garden by making provision for animal
and bird life which will also accommodate the existence of ants, slugs.
A role for rituals
Enjoy a ritual presence in the garden each day, if only for 10 minutes.
Through the ritualized discipline of digging the garden, singings, observing
a flower or sitting on a sacred seat, take care of yourself through taking
care of your garden.
Conduct shared rituals that honour what the garden has given you and you
have given it. Rituals can self-consciously aid thanksgiving and acknowledging
of the seasons; for example, the shortest and longest day, the equinox
of equal day and night.
Conclusion
All gardens have some capacity for access to spiritual experience. The
more they have their own power and are freer to express their species
characteristics then the greater their spiritual facilitative promise.
All of the dimensions discussed can add to the richness of your garden
as a source of wellbeing and soulfulness. The ingredients to consider
include yourself, your friends and family, the place as well as the plants
and their interconnections. Provide space for each voice. While sitting
in the garden or dreaming at night or washing the dishes, let each aspect
mill around. Whenever you do this, trust that this dance will evolve pathways
for your garden. The onus isn’t all on the garden; it is equally
with us. Our minds initially are a barrier to ‘other’ experience.
It isn’t easy, given our society, to open up to spiritual possibilities,
by attuning to left field and right brain while slowing our pace, stilling
our voices. ‘Chopping wood and carrying water’ can still our
mind so the rest of us can receive. Our being will also be well, the more
we are able to be in the garden and allow it to be itself. Then partnership
for cultivating wellbeing can become real.
References
Bruchardon, P. (1998). The Healing Energies of Trees, Gaia books,
London.
Roszak, T., Gomes, M & Kanner, A. (1995) Ecopsychology: Restoring
the Earth,
Healing the Mind, Sierra club books, San Francisco.
Rituals
Human activity that is repeated can evoke a sense of timelessness
that aids transcendence of the everyday towards attunement with the infinite.
An example comes from our cooperative’s Guilfoyle-designed garden
on top of Mt Toolebewong. (Guilfoyle was an important 19th century landscape
gardener in Melbourne). Paths meander through different areas leading
to an intimate circle enveloped in soft evergreens. This has come to be
called the Fairy Garden, where rituals that honour the seasons or welcome
in a new member are held. This began with the children from our co-op’s
kindergarten holding their plays and dancing there- one time dressed up
as fairies. The space called them there and shaped what they did and together
they have shaped what has followed. We are comfortable calling it the
Fairy Garden because it was our children, not us, dancing around dressed
up as fairies- yet if we would allow ourselves to reclaim and regenerate
more of our childhood we would have more openness to spirit.
Back to Text
|
|
