Healing Gardens

mid quarter reflection:

a garden is a space where an individual interact with the land in a symbiotic relationship.

this is the physical definition. Even a place where human beings are not present can still be a garden for some creatures. The riverbeds are gardens to the bears when the salmon spawn there, the forest is a garden for foragers and animals, a city is a garden in the tiny crevices where plant life can be found. Where someone takes care of the land and the plant or plants growing there.

Some of my favorite learning so far has been the ways in which many practices can be a garden. I think even a farm is a garden. It seems farms are more meant to be seen as commercial or sustaining. A garden does not have to fufill that. A garden could be a sheep in the backyard that is sheared in the spring for it's wool, and the wool made into yarn for mittens and hats by the winter. It is an apple tree that drops its fruit in the fall. It is the blackberry vines in the parking lot.

I think of a garden as having a very specific circular action, where care is being given and certain needs are being met by that care. In this way, nature is being cared for and preserved, the land is benefitting, the community is benefitting, the earth is benefitting...   

I think that I am beginning to see "garden" as more of an outlook, one that shows respect for a space, and that yearns for connection with that space and what it has to offer to enrich the community around it.
Garden and cultivation are very similar terms to me lately. I use the word cultivate a lot when referring to a person's creativity and imagination. I believe that art is cultivated in a person, and that in this way, a person's imagination is like a garden as well.