Deeper Explorations
The activities in this section are deeper explorations because they either involve more time or more contemplation. You will also be asked to push your awareness out beyond the garden. This chapter’s explorations are similar, in some ways, to Part 2 of this book, in which we begin with one plant and its correspondence, then channel that mindful focus into the rest of our lives. Each activity in this section is another way to hone our mindfulness skills.
Please note that deeper explorations are also a matter of perspective. Depending on how you approach the previous chapters, most of the explorations found there could be experienced as deeper dives as well.
Exploration
Aligning with One Plant
Type of Exploration: Contemplation
Supplies Needed:
• Journal or paper (Consider a dedicated journal for this practice)
• Pen or pencil
Ideal Setting: A garden or other green space
Child Friendly: Yes
Choosing one plant as a mindfulness anchor can have a profound effect on our awareness and powers of observation. I discovered this by accident in my early days of working with herbs. I had been reading about Echinacea (commonly known as coneflower) and wanted to include it in my garden. I ordered some seeds from a mail-order company, but I didn’t actually know what Echinacea looked like. This may be hard to imagine, but it was pre-internet! It was before Echinacea became a poster child for herbal remedies. It was also a time when a lot of seed catalogs—especially those for nontraditional plants—were basically a black-and-white printed list with a few drawings.
When the seeds arrived, I started them in pots inside my house to get an early start and to be sure of their identity once transplanted. I hovered over these plants every day, watching every minute sign of growth. Once they were planted in the garden, I visited the plants as often as I could to check on their progress. I also dragged various family members out of the house to observe the plants with me, although they were not as excited about this as I was. I wasn’t drawing plants at this time, as described in chapter one, but I think if someone had asked me to draw the plants from memory, I could have done it. It was my summer keenly observing Echinacea.
Many perennials need to get established before they will flower, so I was prepared for no flowers the first year. However, by midsummer, buds started to form. This was exciting for me, but not so much for my family, as I was reenergized in forcing them out to the garden to see this phenomenon. As the buds slowly opened, my excitement shifted to disappointment. It appeared that the plant was just a daisy with pale pink petals and a flat center. I didn’t know exactly what Echinacea looked like, but I knew there was a cone. I wondered if they sent me the wrong seeds.
Over the next few days I continued my observations. The petal colors darkened and the middle cone became more pronounced. The petals pulled back from the cone. This was indeed Echinacea. Every year since, my Echinacea has repeated that dance of opening as a pretend daisy and then shifting to its true self once it blossoms.
I learned a lot that summer, and not only about Echinacea. Plants change every day just as we do. Cells die and are replaced by others. They make subtle shifts toward the light or water. They may shift because of wind or another plant. Many of us have seen time-lapse photography that shows how a plant moves over a period of hours and days. These minute movements are happening continuously and although we can’t always tune in to them, we can observe the differences day-to-day.
When you focus on only one plant, you begin to tune in to subtle changes. You are more likely to see when buds start to form, when leaves begin to change color, and when the plant is thirsty or has had too much sun. This is a rich exercise that can help ground you in the cycles of the seasons and the cycle of death and rebirth.
When selecting a plant to work with, it’s important to have easy access to it. You’ll want to choose something in your yard or a place you visit often. If you will be doing this practice during the winter months, choose a tree or perennial that will be there for you to work with.
You may already have an affinity for one plant. Maybe it is one of the healing herbs that you’ve used on a regular basis or a plant you often use in meal preparation. You may notice it in your neighbors’ yards when walking down the street. If you don’t have an immediate inspiration for the plant you want to work with, walk through your garden or green space with the intention of letting a plant present itself to you.
Once you’ve identified the plant, create a schedule for when you will do this practice. The practice itself does not have to take a lot of time, but you’ll need to return to it on a regular basis. Think about how you will make that happen. If you can do the practice daily, you will tune in to more nuances, but twice a week will work. Find a way to remind yourself of the practice.
On your first visit, take the time to observe the plant and record your impressions. You can begin with some of the opening sensory exercises described in chapter one. Repeat these activities on different days because you will discover different results. As you continue the practice with this plant, you can also explore some of the craft ideas from chapter three, like sun prints and leaf rubbings.
Think of each visit as checking in with a friend. Record your observations and insights in your journal. Questions to consider each visit:
• How would you describe this plant to someone who doesn’t know it?
• How has it grown or changed since your last entry?
• How has the color or fragrance changed?
• What is the energy of the plant?
• What does it feel like when you are near it?
• What attributes does it have?
• What ideas and concepts does the plant invoke in you?
Take the time to learn about this plant not just from observation, but through the wisdom of others. One of my favorite books for plant history and lore is the two-volume A Modern Herbal, first published in 1931 by Maude Grieve. Some of the nutritional and medicinal information is out of date, but the stories about plants and how they have supported humans are fascinating. How does your experience with this plant align with what’s been written about it? Are there ways you might integrate this plant into your life in a more intentional way?
This activity works best with a commitment of at least four weeks, but the longer, the better.
Exploration
Contemplating the Edge
Type of Exploration: Contemplation and deepening awareness
Supplies Needed:
• Journal or paper
• Pen or pencil
Ideal Setting: A garden or other green space for observation
Child Friendly: Yes
“The edge” is a permaculture concept. Permaculture is an approach to designing living spaces and gardens with an eye toward sustainability and production. The edge is the place where two distinct environmental systems come together and intermingle. The edge holds more opportunities and interest than one ecosystem. It is richer with diversity and novelty.
The edge will be more dramatic in large systems, like the ocean meeting the shore and the forest melding into the field. But even in a small yard there will be unique microclimates and spaces where they overlap—the edge. Edges occur along the drip lines of trees and the outer areas of a garden bed. They exist in the few feet next to a building that retains heat or an area near a large decorative rock that reflects more light.
Edges stretch the boundaries of what might successfully grow in an area, either with the gardener’s intention or as a result of plants discovering their own way to the edge. I have a space at the back of my yard that is partially shaded by a hawthorn tree. It’s not a shady or sunny area, but an overlapping area of both. That allows me to comingle sun-loving and shade-loving plants. I have another edge along my patio because the patio absorbs heat, enabling me to plant more tender flowers or herbs there.
It is helpful, when contemplating the edge, to visit a place where the edges are more pronounced, like a stream and bank or a forest and field. Walk along the edge and observe. Notice that the edges along natural systems are wavy patterns, not straight lines. It is usually only humans who try to lay things out in lines and angles. The flowing pattern where natural edges meet increases the surface area of the edge. Take note of the plants and living organisms in this space. Natural edges are not static. How does the edge shift and change? What is the flow between distinct sections?
In your own garden or green space, take time to explore the edges. Walk through your garden while holding the idea of the edge in your awareness. What do you observe?
A key concept in permaculture is optimizing the edge. Where could you take more advantage of the edges? Garden beds with wavy edges mimic natural systems and increase the plant area. Spiral gardens (beds laid out as a spiral mound) create many microclimates so that plants with differing needs can be planted in a close area. The edge along the ground can be optimized by planting upward by using trellises and arbors. Are there ways that you can increase edges or take more advantage of them?
We can also carry the edge concept into our lives. Since we know the edge is more creative, rich, and diverse, how can we think about expanding the edges in our lives? For most of us, there are edges between work time and family time or edges between our book club friends and our workout friends. How might we pay attention to this boundary, stretch it, and increase the richness of those experiences? There are also edges between mornings and afternoons, relaxation time and activity time, waking and sleeping. I have found the edge between waking and sleeping to be particularly creative and insightful. I keep a notebook and pen within easy reach so that I can capture edge ideas as I am drifting off to sleep or just waking.
Use the edge concept as a subject for contemplation. Sit or walk through your garden or other green space holding the edge as an intentional focus. Large edges will be easier to identify, but smaller edges are everywhere. Hold this concept throughout the day, noticing edges and opportunities in the green world and throughout your life.
What does the idea suggest to you? What are some of the edges in your own life? Are they hard edges or is there a flow to them? What opportunities are available for us in the edges? What are the shapes, colors, and energetic feel to the different edges in your life? Record any insights in your journal.
Exploration
Green World Spirals
Type of Exploration: Contemplation and deepening awareness
Supplies Needed:
• Journal or paper
• Pen or pencil
Ideal Setting: A garden or other green space for observation
Child Friendly: Yes
The tendrils on my pumpkin plant wrap themselves in spirals around blades of grass and pull themselves up onto the lower branches of the apple tree. The delicate-looking ringlets belie how strong they are. Pole beans, hops, morning glories, and other climbers all use spirals to coil themselves around trellises and poles.
We may not like bindweed, but we can appreciate its ingenuity in employing spirals to attach itself securely to other plants and root itself into the soil like so many corkscrews.
Look closely at a sunflower seed head, a rosebud, a cabbage head, or a pinecone, and you will see spirals. The spiral shape occurs throughout the green world and throughout the universe. There are extremes in spiral size; we find spirals in our DNA and the Milky Way galaxy.
Spirals are symbols of ever-deepening wisdom. They remind us of our potential to move beyond our present understanding of reality. The spiral is also a great analogy for the cycle of the year, which is often presented as a circle where seasons, opportunities, and challenges repeat themselves. Spirals provide a better map of the journey of the cycle of life. Consider gardening; we sow, tend, water, and harvest, but each year is different and deeper. We’ve learned some things about the plants and our garden, we’ve improved the soil, and we’ve gained experience.
As beginning gardeners, we were at the outer edge of the spiral, slowly moving toward the center with each year that passes. I think of my earliest gardening experiences alongside the adults in my life; I loved interacting with plants and having my hands in the soil, but I knew very little. I was on the outer edge of the spiral. Each season of gardening has deepened my understanding.
Our lives follow this pattern as well. We experience loss and gain, grief and joy, friendship and animosity. When we encounter situations for the first time, we can be a bit overwhelmed. As we gain experience and wisdom traveling along the spiral, we aren’t knocked to our knees as often by the hard things. We appreciate the good things even more because of our wisdom.
Lessons learned and information we take in are often framed as a linear path, but life is much more of a spiral. Sometimes life presents us with a challenge that we feel like we’ve faced a hundred times already. We may feel stuck and as if nothing has changed. If we observe carefully, we might discover the same situation, but we are bringing more wisdom and resilience to the game.
The practice of mindfulness itself is like a spiral. We might feel at times that we have ended up in the same place, possibly a place of inattention or struggling to keep our focus. However, if we commit to practice, we move ever more deeply toward the center.
In contemplating the nature of spirals, you can begin by taking note of the spirals in the green world. Sketch them or just notice how often they appear once you are holding them in your awareness. What is the energy of a spiral? How is it different from the energy of a circle? Where do you notice spirals in the garden? Where do you notice the spiral energy in your own life?
Sitting in meditation, you can hold the spiral as the focus of your awareness. Use a visual representation like a sunflower seed head or use your imagination. What insights and discoveries do you have in contemplating spirals?
Record insights in your journal. Where are you noticing spirals in the green world? Where are you noticing spirals in your life?
Exploration
Contemplating Unity in Opposites
Type of Exploration: Contemplation and deepening awareness
Supplies Needed:
• Journal or paper
• Pen or pencil
Ideal Setting: A garden or other green space for observation
Child Friendly: Yes, recommended for ages ten and up
The garden and the world are in a continual dance of opposites. Sometimes two extremes are in sharp contrast, like the coldest days of winter and the peak of summer. Other times opposites weave together, like a hurricane and its calm center. The yin-yang symbol holds the reality of opposites; the circle is half white and half black, but within each color is a tiny dot of the opposite color. The seed of one is held within the other.
This exploration is about being attentive to this phenomenon in the garden and beyond.
Guidelines for Contemplation
What follows are three pairs of opposites for contemplation. Each pair is a reminder of the complexity of the green world. Read over the information for each pair as a jumping-off point. Then intentionally seek out these concepts and their relationship. This could be a one-time mindfulness exploration or a mindful investigation that lasts many days at a time. As you explore these opposites, you will probably think of your own to investigate.
Begin with the opening breaths, then hold the pair in your awareness as you sit or walk in the garden. As with many mindful explorations, it can be helpful to repeat the words of each pair to let them seep into your awareness and focus your attention.
Where do you notice them and how are they separate and also connected? Move beyond your thoughts about these concepts to energetic feeling. The three pairs of opposites are:
1. Expanding and contracting
2. Light and dark
3. Form and formless
Expanding and Contracting. The pulse of expansion and contraction is a constant garden rhythm. There are sweeping expansions in the spring and summer as plants push out of the ground, leaf out, and flower. Fall and winter reverse the process as plants shed leaves, become smaller, and disappear into the ground. There are also sub-rhythms to this whole process. Peas and salad greens expand quickly in spring and then contract when it gets too hot, just as many plants are expanding. Flowers expand but then contract in midsummer to form seedpods. The seedpods expand in late summer and autumn to release their seeds in various ways. Some burst open like okra. Others, like dandelions, send their seeds sailing on the wind, expanding their range.
There are daily rhythms of expansion and contraction. Leaves open and close their pores during the day to adjust to the heat. Calendula and morning glory flowers open by day and close by night. Nicotiana and moonflowers have a counter-rhythm, opening in the late afternoon and evening and contracting in the morning.
Birds and butterflies expand their wings to fly and contract them to land. Think of rain as expanding the moisture in the garden and dry seasons as contracting it. There is the obvious expansion and contraction of your breath as you meditate. What does the rhythm of expansion and contraction feel like? Observing at different times of the day and during different seasons will produce different insights and discoveries.
Push this exploration out beyond the garden. Where are the sweeping expansions and contractions in your life right now? Where are the micro expansions and contractions? Are you resisting the rhythm or flowing with it? Record insights and discoveries in your journal.
Light and Dark. The impressionist painter Claude Monet dedicated himself to studying light and shadow. He often painted the same landscape again and again, working to capture the subtle changes of light throughout the day. When we are attentive, we can tune in to these subtle shifts as well, even if we might not be able to capture them on canvas.
There is, of course, an obvious shift between day and night. Start your investigation there and experience the changing of light at dawn and dusk. There are often dramatic changes at this time, especially when the sun first makes its appearance on the horizon and sends out beams of light toward the garden. How do light and dark meet each other in those periods of twilight? Where are the edges of light and dark? What do you observe during this time?
Day and night on their own—not just the transition between the two—provide plenty of opportunities to study light and dark. During the day, begin by noticing the changing shadows and dappling of light, either because of clouds or other plants. Even at noon there will be shadows in the garden. What patterns do you see? How do light and dark shift as the sun moves across the sky? How do plants shift and change their energy in relation to the sunlight? What is the overall feeling of light and dark in the garden?
Depending on the phase of the moon or other background lights, the night garden may still be bathed in light, but it will be softer than sunlight. If possible, turn off any artificial lights in your yard as you do this activity. If it is a full moon, you may be surprised at how much light exists. Most nights, there will be some moonlight reflected in the garden. Take time to let your eyes adjust and be with this semidarkness. How does your awareness of the garden differ from daylight? What is the energy of the garden bathed in moonlight? Where does the moonlight fall and what shadows does it make? How does it shift over time?
The darkness may make the garden feel softer and more mysterious. Not everything is visible, so you must rely more on your other senses. Be aware that the word darkness has some negative connotations in English, yet periods of darkness are vital for many plants’ germination and growth. Darkness is also a time of insight, mystery, silence, and rest.
You can push this exploration out beyond the garden by observing the energy of light and dark, and the dance between the two, throughout the day. In your journal, record any insights and discoveries.
Form and Formless. When playing a rhythm, it is the space between the beats that shapes the sound. When using a vase, it is the space inside that makes it functional. In much the same way, the space between plants creates the garden and our experience of it. If a garden was a wall of solid plants, it would be hard to manage and even harder to make sense of.
Shifting your view of space from background to foreground gives you a different picture of the garden. Where is the space and the emptiness in the garden? How does it inform your awareness of the plants and green world?
As gardeners, we know that pruning plants to allow for more space and airflow around them is important, but we don’t usually give it more thought than that. We don’t often tune in to the space itself. This exploration takes our usual view of the world and flips it. Rather than viewing the plants as foreground, have them move to background. This may take some practice; repeat these words to yourself to help tune in to the concepts: “Substance and emptiness, form and formless.”
Perhaps you should start with individual plants rather than the whole garden. What is the space around a particular plant or tree? Is it visible? Is it palpable? Does it have a color? Does it have an energetic footprint or personality? When you are ready, you can shift to taking in more of the garden. Can you rest in awareness of the emptiness around plants? What does that feel like?
Take this idea of form and formless into the rest of your life as well. What happens if you flip your usual way of observing the world and make the formless the foreground? The things you might have highlighted as having substance move to the background. Are your definitions of foreground and background somewhat arbitrary? Use your journal to record any insights and discoveries.
Exploration
Becoming Background
Type of Exploration: Contemplation and deepening awareness
Supplies Needed:
• Journal or paper
• Pen or pencil
Ideal Setting: A garden or other green space
Child Friendly: Yes, recommended for ages ten and up
Western culture’s human-centric interpretation of the world emphasizes separateness from the web of life. Humans are viewed as the pinnacle of creation and the rest of the world exists to serve them in some way. When we label the green world as natural capital, it becomes something to use up for personal gain rather than our actual life support system. We might intellectually know these things, but our bias is usually toward separateness and human centeredness.
In this meditation, you will shift your perspective from being the center of all things to being a part of the collective action in the garden. You change from the solitary star of the story to becoming a participant in an unfolding dance. Being attentive and mindful to the collective nature of reality increases your compassion and ability to make healthy decisions for yourself and the planet.
Begin by sitting or standing in your green space and centering with opening breaths. Take enough time to be present with the flow of energy in the garden. (The garden immersion exploration from chapter five is a good complement to this one. If you have time, you can begin with that meditation and end with this one.)
When you are ready, shift your awareness to a place that is not centered within you. Imagine you are looking down from above or looking from across the garden as a disinterested observer, simply noticing what is happening. Scan the area to take in the plants and other living organisms. Notice that your human form is just one other organism sharing space with others in this garden. Depending on the time of year, there may be bees, butterflies, birds, squirrels, and other organisms visible to your eye.
Take note of the rhythms and energy of this space. Energy is being exchanged and transformed throughout the area. Plants are changing sunshine into food. Bees are collecting pollen. Birds and squirrels might be looking for food. Within the soil, this same play is being acted out. Insects and organisms are getting on with their lives, each with their own agenda. We are each an organism just like the others, not the star of the story, but one thread in the tapestry.
Practice for at least ten minutes, holding an awareness of this diverse community. When you are ready, consciously bring your attention back to your own body and close with three deep breaths.
In your journal, record your discoveries. What insights did you have? How easy or difficult was it for you to contemplate this larger picture of the garden and your smaller part in it?
A Path Forward
Each of the explorations presented in this chapter are possible ways to approach the green world mindfully. My intention is not to list every possible exploration, but instead to hold up a lantern that will illuminate some of the many paths. There are countless variations and ways to proceed. If you start exploring with the premise that gardens and the green world can be a portal to awareness, you will discover your own pathways.