Metaphorical & Spiritual Concepts of the Garden

I’ve become one of those readers that not only reads, marks, or quotes from physical, hard-bound books, but also reads multiple texts at the same time over a period of time.

Recently, I sat down to reread Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (I hadn’t read it since late high school) and concurrently have been reading Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly.

While the Hesse text is considered a collision of Eastern and Western concepts of spirituality, Bly’s reads like a history of mythology, delineating the poets and sages throughout history and using the Grimm fairy tale Iron John (or Eisen Hans, German) as a backbone to describe the masculine journey of men throughout society.

What I found in coincidence this evening was literally opening both these texts to exact chapters that talked about gardens: Kamala’s grove and the King’s Garden, in which the castaway prince with the golden hair, the protagonist in Iron John, labors.

So I wanted to blog about the sanctity and history of the garden, without doing much literary research and while polling even my life.

Even Bly refers to the garden as the respite, where the spirit is renewed, the seeds grown into flowers. In Hesse’s garden, it is where the protagonist Siddhartha learns how to love and earn wealth. And very similarly, it is from the garden that the King’s daughter sees the reflection of the boy’s golden hair, once thought a hindrance, and beckons him to bring her wildflowers from his labors…

And while Bly goes further into Greek, Middle Eastern and even Medieval allusions to the garden, I wanted to tackle a little bit from another story: the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Gethsemane.

It seems all humanity yearns for the garden. It is where we solve our’s and the world’s problems, where we give strength to our desires, where we introspectively ‘find’ ourselves.

Just a week or so ago, I was lucky enough to go and experience a Catholic Mass for the first time since childhood with a reconnected friend. So much history and steeped tradition, it was most definitely her garden. But somehow, aren’t we all in some small way trying to get back to the garden? The garden of creation, the garden of the betrayal and doubt, even childhood, even the kindergarten.

All these experiences these last couple weeks have made me question where my spiritual rod is, my backbone, my garden. And it would be easy for me to say its in my writing or that my faith lay there. But in fact, that would be a cop out. Because even though there are sometimes strong motifs of spirituality in my writing and even further, I am using some of Bly’s philosophies for a novel I’m developing, that still does not let me off the hook. I need a definitive place of worship, of earth and meditation.

So where do I go?

Well, currently I go within myself, I go to the library, I workout. I stretch through reading pages of others’ work, I stretch through editing pages of my own. Not everyone has that specific thing, that specific garden. And as they say, not all people who wander are lost.

For those reading, where is your garden? Where is your respite? I wonder who reads these sometimes. I think that sometimes we may never meet, like the way Walt Whitman narrates Leaves of Grass towards the reader. We may never meet, but somehow we affect each other and it’s in that affection there lies the strength, the resolve, the push. It’s not cliché, it’s not often felt or seen. Mostly, it is only known.

 Gethsemane2

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