Sacred Garden
Song of the Dream Garden
Pillowed on your thighs in a dream garden,
little flower with its perfumed stamen,
singing, sipping from the stream of you –
Sunset. Moonlight. Our song continues.
-Ikkyu Sojun
The mandala: ‘Oasis’
Plant-like organisms are in various stages of growth - dormant, budding or blossoming. Organic flowering forms encased in rich foliage open, bulbous and buoyant, rich and radiant in their unfurling. Others remain clenched, awaiting, perhaps quietly yearning the time of release. This is a process of evolution, an opening and flowering not yet in full bloom.
At the heart of each budding or blooming flower, is an enigmatic blue globe. In the budding forms, the globe appears solid and sturdy, smooth and glassy. In the flowering forms the sphere appears malleable and fluid, rippling out from a softly glowing centre; the glassy shell has been penetrated.
An organic opulence permeates the imagery. Chlorophyll-rich greens speak of thriving lavish vegetation whist deep reds and golden oranges evoke the deep sacredness of a Buddhist temple or Tibetan monastery. An iridescent light imbues the plant life like sunbeams gleaming through stained-glass windows of churches.
There is a sacredness, a preciousness to this mystifying garden, as though the plants themselves are transparent vessels filled with a divine light. The growth and expansion of this holy garden is a treasured journey, radiant in it’s unfolding, yet full fruition is yet to be realized.
What nutrients or fertile soil nourish this flourishing utopian garden? What is the candescent life-force that infiltrates these organic vessels of air and light?
Empty vessels
Clay is shaped to make a pot and what’s useful is its emptiness.
-Lao Tzu, Tao De Jing
God, Spirit, Buddha Nature, the Tao, whatever it is that is sacred, holy and precious longs to shine through, but what is the substance of the clay that forms the vessel?
Perhaps we should look to our little green friends for inspiration; those who sink their roots deep into the mulchy fermentation of the soil, extracting nutrients of the earth whilst receiving photons from the light of the cosmos. An important alchemical process on which all life depends, photosynthesis, takes place within these little earth-vessels in which soil-nutrient and light unite. I wonder if there is a human equivalent, an alchemical process that brings together the substances of human life.
In Chinese Medicine the heart is considered the emperor organ. The heart constantly empties itself of blood to be renewed with new life upon each emptying. In Chinese Medicine physically and energetically, the heart needs to be emptied to allow the spirits to enter the body. The blood, which passes through the heart, is the substance that grounds the spirit and the current on which it rides to permeate the body. And so there is this fusion between spirit and substance, which the Chinese call Jingshen – essence and spirit fused.
As the plant is, as the heart is, so too are we capable of being empty vessels where vital life forces unite and converge.
Midnight, no waves,
no wind, the empty boat
is flooded with moonlight
-Dogen
Soil of the soul, light of the spirit.
We are very much like a blind person who finds a jewel buried in a heap of garbage. Right here in what we’d like to throw away, in what we’d find repulsive and frightening, we discover the warmth and clarity of Bodhicitta. –Pema Chodron
Last night I had a dream that I was standing in the ocean waist high in water. Mammoth waves rose before me threatening to engulf and pummel me, yet unexpectedly each one never rose higher than my waist. Perhaps the waves of my dream represent the wild, tumultuous and often overwhelming substance of life. The fact that they didn’t consume me says something about a capacity to arise to meet challenges, of staying afloat. The waist high water spoke to me of two forces meeting in the middle; the one embodied a weighty realm, the other airy and ethereal – soul and spirit.
Somehow the art of living seems to involve a tension between being deeply immersed in this world whilst remaining afloat; a communion of soulfulness and spirit that keeps one from drifting in weightless optimism or being submerged in gluey pessimism. Not to say that the one is resplendent and light whilst the other is dark and grim - a white orchid arises from the mud as the Buddhists say, whilst light can cast a shadow.
A few words of wisdom…
I saw optimists everywhere but optimism didn’t interest me. To be blissful in the midst of pain, to avoid bad news like the plague, it seemed to me, was no great indicator either of mental health or of spiritual growth. I knew of no scriptures anywhere that answered grief by pretending it didn’t exist.
- Joan Chittister
I search for spirit in the tangled emotions, the impossible relationships, and the endless failures that come along in most people’s lives. This is the opposite of spirituality as escape; it is an appreciation for the spirituality to be found down in the depths of experience, in the never-ending efforts to make sense of life and the ordeals that can be seen as spiritual initiations rather than the failures to achieve a self.
- Thomas Moore.
Jung wrote a book called ‘The Earth has a Soul; I would suggest that earth is the soul, the mother soul. And that if we wanted to make distinctions then heaven is the greatest embodiment of spirit. When I say heaven I refer to it in a Taoist yin-yang sense, as a vibrational opposite to the energetics of the earth. I don’t believe there is an ‘up there in heaven’ and a ‘down here’: a heaven-earth dichotomy. Nor do I believe that there is a need to cultivate something down here in order to get up there. I believe it is all right here, right now. We are children of heaven and earth joined to each by a thread as intimate as that which we share with our parents and this same thread unites everything in the cosmos.
‘…I am looking for the link between soul and spirit. When the situation is ideal, it is impossible to tell the difference between these two dimensions,’ writes Thomas Moore.
Finding the point of tension or balance of soul and spirit, of living between heaven and earth could be the gateway to a concealed oasis that arises from immersing oneself in the soupy fullness of human existence whilst remaining ever open to the light. This oasis: a forgotten neglected heaven on earth, a lost gem, a sacred garden within that longs to bud to grow, to blossom into its fullest, richest and most radiant.
Easter Morning in Wales
A garden inside me, unknown, secret,
neglected for years,
The layers of its soil deep and thick
Trees in the corners with branching arms
And the tangled briars like tangled nets
Sunrise through the misted orchard,
Morning sun turns silver on the pointed twigs
I have woken from the sleep of ages
And I am not sure if I am really seeing, or dreaming
Or simply astonished
Walking toward sunrise
To have stumbled into the garden
Where the stone was rolled from the tomb of longing.
-David Whyte
