What’s Growing In Your (Inner) Garden?
Gardens are metaphors for our inner world— that which we tend to flourish. What we ignore manifests in an overgrowth of unwanted weeds. Gardens also remind us that nothing is permanent — life changes like seasons in the cycle of birth and death. We begin like sprouts, growing in the darkness until we are born into the light; as we mature, flourishing, bearing fruit or flowers, and when the winter of life comes, disintegrating in decay back into the earth — fertilizing the next cycle of life.
When I was a child, we always had a vegetable garden, and one of my chores was to help tend to the garden. My Mom told me that plants could sense human emotion, and if we spoke to them with love, they would be happy and strong.
Every day I sat next to the philodendron in the living room, telling her how beautiful and healthy she was. To this day, some of my plants have names and personalities. One of those plants is a massive spider plant that I call the Mothership. Many of her young shoots have populated friends' homes with more spider plants.
My favorite childhood book, The Secret Garden, is a children’s novel written by Frances Hodgson Burnett in 1911. In the story of love and healing through children's eyes, each was enduring their suffering, restoring life, beauty, and magic to a walled-in dead and forgotten garden. The story always made me feel that anything was possible and that people, with a bit of love, can heal and grow.
I am a sucker for a ‘ triumph of the human spirit story. It’s never too late to revitalize an aspect of ourselves we thought had gone dormant or been lost. We are in a perpetual state of renewing and recreating ourselves right down to the cellular level. We have the power to create our reality.
When I was four or so, my family spent the summer camping at Hammonasset Beach in Connecticut. The ocean's briny smell, the gulls' cries, and the childhood joy of seeing the magic in every detail are etched in my memory. I only learned years later that my family was homeless at the time while my Dad was making a go in the early days of IT start-ups. My mother never let on there was anything but a joy to be experienced.
I work with military veterans living with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress. I teach them breathwork and meditation — the controlled breath addressing the root of the trauma, like pulling noxious weeds, revealing the veteran to themselves, that changeless, peaceful space within; A version of themselves they believed had been lost years back on a battlefield.
We are all still in there — once the suffocating weeds and vines are pulled, and love, sunshine, and water are applied, life begins to bloom again like a bright, fragrant flower. We are all redeemable and worthy of goodness and sweetness in life.
Yesterday I looked at what was taking up space and suffocating my garden, and it was mint. Chocolate and orange mint. Deceptively charming small round leaves… I naively planted the creeping culprits a few years ago, not knowing how aggressively it grows. Its root system takes over and strangles every plant in its path. The mint took over prime real estate in the sunniest section of my garden. Its days as a garden bully are nearly over.
It took me hours of labor with a hoe, pitchfork, and a lot of brut force to pull the mint out by the root. My lavender bush became a casualty of the battle and had to go because its roots were heavily entangled with the mints. Some things can’t be saved. The sooner we can understand that truth and let go, the sooner we can move ahead.
We have all sowed seeds we later regret or find an overgrowth of weeds when we fail to tend to our garden. As I pulled the mint, I took inventory of the ‘metaphorical mint’ in my mind that has taken over these past two years, or maybe longer. What parts of me got strangled by prolonged solitude and anxiety about ‘what’s coming next?’. I replaced that thought, asking the question, what beautiful things can I plant to bring my inner garden back into balance? What fertilizer does it need?
We have become so separate from nature. Many of us have no idea how to keep a house plant alive, let alone a whole garden. It’s time to become reacquainted with that wild, natural side of ourselves. Gardening and being close to nature and the earth is profoundly healing; it nourishes the mind, body, and spirit. It stills the mind and replaces nagging questions with wonder when observing the perfection of nature.
Walking barefoot on the earth grounds us and has many health benefits. Digging barehanded in the soil gives us the advantage of mycobacterium vaccae, an organism found in soil and a known mood booster for humans: soil, the anti-depressant as old as dirt!
Forest bathing, known in Japanese as Shinrin-yoku, is mindfully immersing yourself in nature, using your senses to derive benefits for your physical, mental, emotional, and social health. One doesn’t have to be in the forest to receive this gift from nature. My form of Shinrin-yoku is to garden in my pajamas, barefoot, on cool summer mornings with the rising sun, the dew evaporating and rising in clouds of steam.
My cat Jun Jun understands the importance of Shinrin-yoku and, on warm summer evenings, comes to the back door, meowing and beckoning me to join him for our evening ritual. I pick him some fresh catnip from the garden. While he gets kitty-stoned, I lay in the grass next to him, watching the clouds and listening to baby birds calling out to mom and dad for more bugs for their rapidly growing bodies. I wait for the first cricket to sing its song, prompting a symphony of crickets to join. The sun meets the horizon.
One of my favorite documentaries, The Biggest Little Farm, follows a couple who takes on a barren piece of land in California with a vision of creating a harmonious ecosystem. Over seven years of trials and triumphs, they created an exquisite ecosystem of plants and animals in harmony and balance with the natural world. Bio-diversity is necessary for land and everything that inhabits it to thrive. Remove one element, and the ecosystem begins its collapse.
I live in suburban Boise, Idaho, so my dream of having a little farm is not there just yet. However, each year, I work to diversify the plants and trees in my yard to turn the space I have into a food forest. Last year elderberry bushes and a fig tree were added; this year, more varieties of raspberries and hardy kiwis joined my apple, cherry, blueberry bushes, and stone fruit salad tree (it bears plums, nectarines, and apricots), along with a plethora of flowers, medicinal herbs, and vegetables.
With each passing year, I observe more volunteer plants I have never seen before popping up and a greater variety of birds, including hawks, falcons, ducks, quail, and owls stopping for a visit or a meal. And, of course, the ever-present squirrels have made my yard their sanctuary.
The same is true for people. We are far more complex than plants, but without the proper nourishment from social, emotional, physical, and spiritual elements of life, there is a failure to thrive, and health issues begin erupting. I have watched my mental wellness waiver during the pandemic and observed a steep decline in the mental wellness of others. We have been floating in a fog of disconnect as we pulled away from people and routines, support networks, and safety nets. We were all missing critical inputs to our well-being.
The long-required physical distance of six feet is an unfortunate phenomenon; in Germany, the police used actual measuring sticks to keep people distanced from each other in a crowd. Humans are electrical beings, and whether we realize it or not, we connect through an electromagnetic field generated by our hearts. This field can be measured several feet away from the body. We sense and communicate from this space on a subtle level.
Our very well-being depends on physical closeness to others, on touch. The prolonged absence of intimacy in our daily lives has taken a more significant toll on people than I think we have yet to understand fully. The lack of human touch can lead to depression; the absence of touch has a name in psychology — skin hunger.
Even plants and trees communicate through their roots, fungi, and bacteria. If one tree is not well, the others sense it and send energy to it. Humans are the same, yet our communities and natural support networks crumbled in many ways, and many have tragically not survived the toll this has taken on mental health.
I am an introvert. I enjoy the stimulation of being with people, but then I need peace to recharge my batteries. My usual routine pre-pandemic was to travel frequently around the country with my work. Lots of human interaction on the road, and then I would come home and balance that stimulation with a quiet environment, just me, my cat Jun Jun and my garden. I was in balance.
My world, like everyone elses’, got turned upside down. Balance was lost. I have finally accepted that the isolation during the pandemic, though initially providing a beautiful pause for introspection and bread baking, profoundly impacted me. I am a resilient person. I have endured a lot and will endure this; however, I struggle even with the awareness and tools at my disposal. We are alone in this together. Each of us is journeying through as best we can.
Nature lets me know I am on the right path internally. My inner world is mirrored in my outer world. The more I tend to the well-being of my inner world, the more extraordinary beauty and abundance appear in my garden of flora and fauna each year. One feeds the other.
My pollinator garden, a memorial to my Mom, who was an incredible gardener, is soon to be an explosion of vibrant colors, abuzz with the activity of darting hummingbirds, levitating bumble bees, industrious honey bees, and floppy butterflies.
What’s in your garden?
