In The Garden

   My name means “keeper of the Park.”  As I grow older, I develop a deeper appreciation for nature with each passing year.  Awakening had a lot to do with it.  There were times in awakening that the living things helped me to have clearer energy.  It is hard to explain, but its as though you become this live wire with everything around you.  Suddenly you see or feel into another world of experience.  It can make you feel a little unsettled at first, but for me now, its an important and sacred part of the experience.  Touching nature from the inside out.  



Some months before my awakening I was feeling this flush of energy and wrote something called “The Yearning.” This thing spilled out of me so fast that when I looked at the clock on the computer, I could hardly believe my eyes.  Whatever this was, it really came out of me like a lightening bolt!  The piece was actually about awakening, even though I didn’t know it at the time.  It also wound up being so similar to passages within The Gospel of Thomas that it left me scratching my head in wonder…

But in that piece, I was writing about how nature surely feels the flush of passion and desire, else, why go on?  Surely all of life here is enlivened by the pleasure principle, the passion that fills root and vein and all else here, keeping us bound to this great circle of life and re-creation. In the piece it was October and I was looking back on the change of the seasons.  Now, seven or eight years later, I am now doing the same.

I have been slowly but surely developing my properties with flowers and plants of all kinds.  At my studio I have butterfly bushes and lillies as well as Mums and some herbs like oregano and sage.  At home I have grown a caucophany of flowers from succulents to lilies, wildflowers, tall flowers, shortflowers, bright and dark ones as well.  With the flowers coming to their end, I have taken to saving their seeds.  This is itself a meditative practice that gives me time to honor the beauty these plants gave and the island of life they created with hummingbirds, moths, butterflies, bees of all kinds, and other flying insects (along with a spider or two). There is something very fulfilling about seeing so much activity spring up out in the yard.

So it is this time of year that I have been collecting seeds.  I take them apart and take out their seeds, slowly winnowing the chaff to get down to the seed.  I have a broad range of saved seeds now on my table.  It looks like some kind of natural history exhibit!  IN the last few weeks my daughter has helped me gather seeds and I am very proud to say that I have enough seed to increase my plantings a hundred times over what they were this past season!  Its fabulous, really.  I can now plant seed in other places and create whole islands of new flower beds, which leads me into spring with a light step and a flutter in my heart.  I can hardly wait!  And when that time does come, what other flowers will I go and pick out at the nursery to add to the wild array of flowers now silent and still, existing for now as seeds?  Given what has been happening to genetic diversity and seed viability, I take it upon myself to save seed that are genetically safe, non GMO, and viable as organisms.
The raspberries have quadrupled and I am getting ready to replant them in an ever extending bed, and my two fig cuttings have begun to bush out.  Next year it might be plums, cherries, and…..what else….(suggestions are welcome!)….



Over the last few weeks we took photos of the garden, my daughter and I.  Its nice to think about what took place there and how three red flower plants will not turn into a hundred as a single flower bud offers up as many seeds.

Every day upon Gaia is a wonderful gift.  Being able to watch things grow and to enjoy the swell of life that it creates is simply great.  Some of life’s greatest pleasures are the simplest.