Planting Your Inner Garden

Friends bought a house with a large garden about 10 years ago. I've seen it on numerous occasions over the years, and visiting recently, I was gratified to see how their work had paid off with a multitude of trees, grasses, blooms, and climbing vines giving cooling shade and brilliant hues to this garden. I have no doubt that in another decade, I will be even more amazed at its beauty.

The willingness to put in the work in order to have achieved this garden that offers such delight to the senses, not only because of its obvious visual splendor, but also because of its auditory pleasures: the wind through the trees and bamboos, and the birds and insects that are attracted to it, is a wonderful analogy for much of what happens in our lives.

What of your inner garden? Are you caring for it, planting seeds that will bring you a rich harvest in years to come? Are you watering and fertilizing it with love and care, so that nothing (that need not) withers and dies? Are you mulching to protect the soil? Are you also content to sit back and - perhaps in solitude and silence - enjoy the times when most of your garden lies fallow, waiting for more obviously productive and verdant times to arrive when spring returns? Do you rejoice in the never-ending cycle of birth, life, and death?

Jorge Luis Borges wrote: So plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. If you wait for someone to bring you flowers - which we could interpret as waiting to find fulfillment or happiness through another (or a thing), you will always depend on that (or those) other/s to be there for you in the specific way you need for them to make you happy or to feel fulfilled. If they (or it) should disappear from your life, where would you be? Another way of interpreting this is to consider the masses of people who are waiting and hoping for a particular thing or event to take place (a hoped-for trip, a coveted purchase, weight-loss, a promotion, etc.), so that then - finally - they can feel good. Waiting for someone (life) to bring you flowers of this sort, is another exercise in futility, if you are not planting your own garden (in which case you would not be doing this kind of waiting anyway).

Planting your own garden and decorating your own soul are perhaps two of the most important and life-giving things you can do for yourself. What are you planting today?

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Books by Dr. Gabriella Kortsch


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