Many serious minded women and men, spiritual seekers, have become advocates for gardening as an effective means to start and stay on the spiritual path. They are rediscovering a centuries old tradition of combining prayer, meditation, or silence with the daily efforts of hoeing, digging, watering, planting, harvesting, and pruning in their gardens. Even the quiet contemplation of the beauties and wonders of a garden, after a few hours of work in the garden, are sufficient for many to transport them into mystical reveries or provide profound insights.
Gardening satisfies many basic human needs. A garden offers protection for the home, a safe place for leisure time activities, and a haven for the mystically inclined. Gardening allows for personal participation, hands on involvement, and intimate earthly connections. Gardens provide a laboratory for learning about Nature, a homeground for the practice of the arts and sciences, and a sure method for understanding more about our world. Gardening satisfies our thirst for artistic and personal creativity, and allows us to unfold some of the mysterious layers of creation itself. We are free to create our gardens to reflect our own tastes and desires, free to explore the magnificent palette of colors and smells that a garden can offer, and freed from some of the cares and worries than bind our lives. Gardening can point to our true selves, help us grow a new identity, form our characters, and reflect our unique personalities. Our gardens shown our concern and love, provide a common ground for conversations and friendships with others, pat us on the back for a job well done, and are a enduring source for our affections towards Mother Nature. Gardening helps us relax, unwind, smile, and enjoy our moments of leisure in our busy lives. And for the gardener, in the end, as we open a husk of corn, or crack a walnut, or peel a potato, or slice a tomato ... we can satisfy the hunger and thirst that are our calling to Life.
"Gardening is an active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe."
- Thomas Berry
"Cultivate the garden within."
"We may have to learn again the mystery of the garden: how its external characteristics model the heart itself, and how the soul is a garden enclosed, our own perpetual paradise where we can be refreshed and restored."
- Thomas Moore
"Indian monks were the first to choose the garden as the proper setting for their lives, which were devoted to the contemplation of the divine; but with a prophetic eye we may see that the garden will often be dedicated in a like manner: at a later time Greek philosophers, and monks in early Christian days, will retire into their gardens for united, yet silent, contemplation."
- Marie Luise Gothein, A History of Garden Art, 1928, p.50
Spirituality and Gardening
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