Healing Gardens

Sylvia Terry

Reflections I

Healing Garden

Marja Eloheimo

Spring 2007

If one would ask me which one of my branches I would nourish, the answer would have to be, all the senses.  In the spring it is all about feeling, seeing, tasting, touching and smelling. 

The world is getting ready to open up and come to new life.  Inside I am still in a dormant state, but I am getting restless.  The days are still changing from sunny and bright to dark and grey and with that my mood changes as well.  With every day the sun is out, I feel a little better and the winter blues seems to go away a little more day by day. 

This spring season though is different from any other in my life, because my goal is near; the goal I have worked for so long, to graduate and get my degree.  This is the reason I am even more exited than ever for this spring to come and move into the summer.  I will graduate in June and will bring in the harvest of the seeds I put out.  I look at school just like an area one would choose for a garden, school was and still is years of carefully selecting, many hours of tender, loving, and learning care, frequent feeding and watering, struggles at times, but at the end look at what I have achieved and harvest the fruits of my labor. 

So naturally the blueprint for this spring is to put everything I got into the work I have to do.  I will try to take in everything that is offered to me in the classes I take-that’s my plan. 

I am sure there will be difficulties to overcome; people are not like plants, where nature has everything worked out in detail. 

So I am just hoping my plan works out also and can look at my degree in the summer, even though I cannot really say how I will feel about that! It seems that I have been following this path for so long that I could not see a finish. 

The coming spring, the renewing of life, the sun, which nourishes earth at this time in the year will give me the needed energy to fulfill my task. 

I am exited and ready to work, and frightened at the same time.  This class seems very different from what I know.  All the classed I had in the past were science classes, that’s what I know.  I don’t really know yet what is expected of me, and cannot picture what I am supposed to do in the garden.  At this point I don’t even know if I am doing this paper the way my teacher wants it.

I am so very behind right now! I have not seen the Longhouse Garden just yet, and don’t even have all the books I can read upon for help.  I only been in class one Wednesday and a few hours on Saturday, than I had an injury and had to lie still for a week.  So right at this moment I just don’t know.

But I am positive after I catch up with all the readings and the work it will be great fun, and very satisfying.

To the question however, as of how I can actively draw nourishment from these elements, or what potentials they each do offer me, and how they can help me act, I can only refer to the readings I have done so far.  I find the “Sacred Plant Medicine” most intriguing; I could not stop putting this book down, and found things out about herbs I have been using for many years I did not know.  Where as the “The Herbalist’s Way” is rather lengthy and it takes me almost to long to read a chapter.  This in return leads me to lose its attention and forget what I have read.  It is a bit too technical for me just yet.  I guess I have to pick the passages I need when I need them.

At this point I have not had a chance to read anything of the “Biopiracy” just yet, because I received this book and the “Sacred Plant Medicine” only on Monday, April 18^th.   

I hope that this paper is at least close to what you wanted.  I am sure you will give me some feedback on it.