Create the future #6: How ‘spiritual gardening’ teaches us to embrace life, love and death
A wonderful day, isn’t it?
It is your choice, my love. 🌟
A few weeks ago, I started a small plant nursery on our balcony with nothing but a few empty egg cups, a handful of soil (literally scooped out from our front-yard garden), and the dream to be a ‘Jungle Mama’. 🧝♀️ This is how my last article on gardening started (read more here about “It’s sexy and I grow it…” Plants and their love for music”), and not only did you guys send wonderful feedback but it seemed that many of you started your own journey of home-gardening. YIPIEHH! And why not: It is a wonderful time to be a home gardener, because, finally, we are all at home. 💖
A word of caution: Don’t continue to read this post if you have botanophobia (fear of plants), anthophobia (fear of flowers), dendrophobia (fear of trees), lachanophobia (fear of vegetables), alliumphobia (the fear of garlic, surely what Dracula suffered from), mycophobia (fear of mushrooms), or entomophobia (fear of insects). 😉 If you are fine, enjoy - and welcome to the magic world of spiritual gardening! 🌿
Today’s article comes with a soundtrack.
I wrote this piece while listing to Ludovico Einaudi, one of my most favourite composers and musicians of all times. If you want to get into the same groove, feel free to listen to his piano composition “I Giorni” while reading. It is such a beautiful, hopeful, inspired piece of music… uff! 🤩
“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” - Henry David Thoreau
What is spiritual gardening?
Have you ever sat in awe of a glorious sunset? Or stood in front of a mountain range feeling small and humble? Have you stopped in your garden to marvel at a freshly blossomed flower? If the answer is yes to even one of the above questions, then you understand that nature is our biggest master. And thus, our little balcony garden is like a nice, gentle primary school teacher to us! 🤗
Often, we humans think of the ‘spiritual’ as something disconnected from the natural world, like one God, or many Gods, floating invisibly above our heads. Or we worship the power of our minds, or the mysterious silence deep inside our souls that we so rarely hear. And yet, it is a false premise to introduce any kind of duality between the spiritual and the natural - and almost all ancient cultures in the world already knew this better than we do. Time to go back to the green school of life, my friends! 🤓
Gardening helps us deal with our fear of death - and that why it is so soothing in these stressful times*.
In this day and age, we are all confronted with more death than we are used to - or we actually want. Just opening the newspaper or watching TV these days can give us massive amounts of anxiety, and leave us in a brain fog and physical dis-stress. It is not that there wasn’t death around before COVID19, no, but we could simply decide to not tune in. Syria? Far away. Kids in India still dying of hunger? Sad, but hey, we are not the super rich who could stop global hunger with one single bank transfer. Watching people die in TV Shows and movies? They are not real! But now, the idea of death has us suddenly on our toes, and maybe, in a larger, much more zoomed-out sense, it might be actually a good thing. Let me tell you why.
Our constructed fear of death is a resistance to that natural order and flow of life. Thus, we forget our place in a bigger picture and view death as an unnatural event, which robs us of our joy in living and embracing the now. When I speak about death, I not only mean the physical act of perishing (a scary and ‘close-to-home’ scenario these days, no doubt), but also the death of our ego, the old ways of living, and of habits and patterns that don’t suit us and Mother Earth anymore. Many of us experienced many of those painful form of deaths over the last months while forgetting that death is necessary for the next step in the circle of life: (Re-)Birth. The next chapter. New ways of living, eating, consuming. Inner and outer growth. Absolute and effortless blossoming. In a nutshell: Life! 🤗
Thus, gardening can give us a well-deserved sense of control and ‘Happy Ending’ in a time where nothing seems to make sense anymore. Getting our hands dirty, and digging in the sacred soil, the same way our ancestors did, connects us to the universe, and teaches us to see who we really are: A happy, wondrous blip in the gigantic cycle of life. Utterly insignificant, and yet, our sheer existence matters as much as a small plant in your balcony pot that found its way from a seed that found its way through the soil to see the light. 🙏 It is up to you to chose what way you want to look at it.
“There are certain, very stabilising forces in gardening that can ground us when we are feeling shaky, uncertain, terrified really. It is these predictable outcomes, predictable rhythms of the garden that are very comforting right now.” - Professor Joel Flagler, Rutgers University
Nature presents the endless cycle of life right in front of our eyes - in all its resplendent beauty. 🌿
Growing, blooming, rooting, pollination, enduring wind, rain, epidemics and pollution, dispersing seeds, and growing anew… Plants follow the same pattern as we do, but with much less anxiety**. This wonderful short animation the “Story of Flowers”, directed by Tokyo-based botanical artist Azuma Makoto, showcases the life cycle of flowers as a wordless, and beautifully designed explainer. Enjoy! ☀️
If you want more of this, don’t miss out on the second, equally trippy and beautifully made short film “Story of Flowers 2”!
Learn the ways of “spiritual gardening” in five steps:
Many of you know already that I name each of my plants, that I chat with them, or sometimes even sing a little song for both our wellbeing and entertainment. I feel very content while doing it, and the understanding that each of them is a little sentient being, growing, feeling and expressing the same way as you and I do, connects me to my personal truth: THAT WE ARE ALL THE SAME.
There is no difference between you, me, the sky, the cat or the cactus! All of us are carbon-based life forms made more or less from the same material, that stem from the same place, and will go back to it once this story is over. 🌈 If you want to push your gardening to the next level, and add a spiritual element to it, too, here are five small ways of how to go about it. Have fun! 🌿
1. Set your intentions, and change the story in your head.
Change the way you think and ‘re-brand’ your time in the garden as your personal “growth practice”. Gardening can become a tool to access spirituality, just as meditation or yoga is. 🤸♀️
2. Designate a specific amount of time when you can work quietly with no interruptions.
You wouldn’t allow a Zoom Call interrupt you in a yoga class or while meditating, would you?Your time in the garden should be treated with the same amount of respect. It’s your sacred time, and plants don’t talk in words, so you have to be extra quiet and mindful to listen what gossip they have to tell you! 🤗
3. Think in terms of process, not results - and write it all down.
Don’t think of all the Kale that might be able to munch on, or the amount of carrots you will dip into a hummus bowl during your next Netflix evening… The way is the goal, not the result. Focus on the way the plants grow. How do they look each day? Are they happy? Are they sad? If you want to be super nerdy (welcome to my world, then start writing a diary and note down your observations. It is sooooooo worth it!) Especially for all the first-time-gardeners out there: Don’t be afraid if plants die in your hands - they come back, one way or another. 🙏
4. Say thanks for the beauty that surrounds you.
Become aware that each little plant is a gift, and a teacher, showing us how to be resilient, strong, and always, no matter what, strive towards the light! So formulate a small sentence that comes from your heart and say thank you: It is all that’s needed. 💖
5. Look for magic - it is hiding in plain sight.
If you find a family of trolls living inside your flower pot one morning… AMAZING! For all of us who are still waiting for supernatural beings to show up, don’t worry: Over time, you will become aware that magic is everywhere already. We human beings tend to look for miracles in the big and the grand. We want fireworks and drama. And yet, the smallest of creatures, the simplest of beings is at the root of so much wonder, and so much life. The more deeply you connect with your own nature, as well as the nature that surrounds you, the more you’ll start experiencing what I mean. 😉 And then, the party is truly on! 💥
There are many more lessons in nature waiting for us to be discovered.
Thanks to one of IJR’s World dear readers, I discovered the lovely Instagram account of Annika Izora, and her 10 lessons taught by gardens - all of them full of wonderful, resonating truths. 💖 Albert Einstein was the one who said “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” Thank you so much, Disha - you are a genius, too!
Today, root yourself and start be-leafing.
If you woke up today and felt low, sad, or that you need a break from it all: this Corona life, work, the rain, Zoom calls, your tyrant cat… be assured: you are not alone! 🌺 Carve out four minutes of your time, take a couple deep breaths, give yourself a hug, and watch this video. Trust me: You’ll instantly feel lighter and happier. 🙏 Filmed over 3 years (!) and finished in 4K, this rather epic ode to spring unfolds majestically, much like the flowers and the music (Jim Perkins, you genius!) in the footage - and exactly like the potential for love and hope that we all carry inside ourselves. Uff, I can’t get enough of it! 🤗
Remember: May we all grow gardens inside and outside of us where resilience blooms, vulnerability unearths, and change blossoms.
If you see a nice flower today, say hi, and thank you for her reminder to us that there is light even in the darkest of times. In this sense: Stay safe, stay healthy, and stay positive. 💖 I will be back on Thursday!
With love from Goa,
Isabelle 🌿
* Charlotte Mendelson wrote in her lovely piece for the New Yorker called “The Tonic of Gardening in Quarantine” that “what all gardeners know, and the rest of you may discover, is that if you have even the smallest space, a pot on a window ledge, a front step, a wee yard, there is no balm to the soul greater than planting seeds. Watching them begin to sprout, checking far too often as the firm yet fragile stems break free of the soil, the dry seed-case caps, is a joy so strong you can feel it in your knuckles. Rose-geranium leaves and thyme flowers, the hit of petrichor from damp soil, are the scents of heaven.” How right she is. 🌺
**As far as we know. All plants have feelings, and communicate to each other and us, but it is yet to proof if their fear of death comes with the same amount of anxiety as it does with ours.
