The Healing Garden
The Gardeners Kitchen
There are few of us who do not need healing; we are all wounded in one way or another. We can heal ourselves, our community and our home, the earth, all at the same time though some very simple and basic acts.
Now is the time to return to the garden. Gardening is relationships and interaction. When you garden you engage yourself in Life’s Dance and are no longer alone.
The garden does not have to be large nor does it need to grow food, it simply has to be a space where you tend the earth and this can be a garden bed in your own backyard; a container on your patio or deck or a plot or allotment in a community garden.
Community gardens have the ability to be true healing places. They bring people together in a shared cause and become common ground where ideas and thoughts are shared and strangers become neighbours and friends.
What is essential for your garden, regardless of its size or location, is that no artificial chemicals are used, for any reason. The natural or organic garden will help heal the earth by restoring the ecosystem where the garden is planted. It will not destroy life in order to grow food or flowers. The organic gardener is already on a healing path.
Organic growing is not difficult as there are only a few basic things one needs to know. The first is put the right plant in the right place; if the plants are situated where they get the sunlight they need and the gardener, if needed provides them with the required water, they will do well.
The second thing to know and this is a truly healing act; the organic or natural gardener builds soil. Soil is life. All we eat comes from the soil and its interaction with the elements, sun, rain and wind. The gardener plants the see where it belongs and tends that seed, bringing it into being and caring for it through the cycle from seed to seed.
Not all plants will be allowed to go to seed, some are harvested for humans use but some are left so they can be planted the flowing year, thus allowing the life cycle to continue.
The gardener decides where the seed will be planted rather than letting Nature scatter them where it will.
Thus the gardener has chosen to be responsible for the growth and development of the seed; to see it through the various stages from life to rebirth.
Gardening heals the body, mind and the spirit, spend a few minutes, as often as you can in the garden, looking after even one plant, and you will begin to realize why we must return to the garden
