It started relatively early for me, since I was in my early twenties, that I wanted to become a stay-at-home monk when I get older. It’s an oxymoron, I know, as one does not set goals to be enlightened. But I set goal to everything 🙂
Perhaps it’s not by accident that all depictions of heaven, nirvana, or anything that is holy and peaceful really, have a garden in them. The garden kinda brought me through the pandemic (among other amazing things in people), and it has been helping with my baseline level of stress and anxiety lately around my life.
A lot of people here just go to the Garden center and buy already grown flowers and plants to beautify their yards and homes, which is great, but also very North American. People want quick fixes. People want beauty without the dirt and soil, bugs and bees, backache, and shoulder pain. And I get it (I do the same with other aspects of my life, like cleaning). But for me, the garden isn’t about the produce (we have a grocery store for that), isn’t about the end curb appeal (flowers do help my mood, though), but it’s about growing something, raising something, and caring about something. It’s about my absolute lack of control of the climate, the weather, and the waiting. It’s always the waiting that is the hardest.
When is the weather getting better?
When can this squash, this corn, this peas grow and latch onto their trellis?
When will it rain? When does it hail?
The waiting and the lack of control. It’s anxiety-inducing. The loneliness, it’s isolating and chaotic. Yet, in a garden, with all of that, with the waiting, without control, absolutely by myself, I feel calm. I and calm do not usually belong in a sentence.
And here we are, with a garden full of Indigenous wisdom (thank you, the Three Sisters), full of local and native plants, full of hope that endangered bees have another source of food, and full of randomly weird pots and planters from the years I have lived here.
And that is all there is.
Pace Fine Arts 