Healing Gardens

Lorn Brace-Wessel
Healing Gardens
Weekly Reflection #4

The grasp of winter has been on us for quite some time. I love certain parts of winter, but it has an interesting effect on people. The sky gets shrouded in clouds, blocking the sun from the sky, casting us in darkness for long periods of time. The air around us gets cold and moist, and the rain begins to fall and never quits, and the days just get shorter and shorter. It puts everyone on edge. No one wants to face the elements, so it confines people to the indoors. This lack of movement creates pent up energy, making people restless.
It’s so much harder to go outside in the winter, but it’s not so bad once you get out there and the nice crisp air hits your lungs. A lot of the trees have lost their leaves, leaving skeletons of their former selves, soon to flesh out once again in the nearing spring. The only sign of life is the rich green pines and firs that put a sweet smell in the air, and the chirps of the few birds that stuck around in their branches to last out the winter.
My relationship with my journal has not been too good. I’m laying it out flat…I’m no artist. I like to try though, and I can doodle like nobodies business, but it’s hard for me to draw physical objects. I have no spatial sense when it comes to trying to represent things on paper. Also the coldness makes it hard to draw outdoors without gloves on, and gloves don’t help with the drawing aspect of things. I still enjoy attempting it. As things warm up and the plants start to come back to life, I can se myself doing it much more. There’s just so much more action going on in the spring, things seem slow right now.
Medicine – medicine is anything that helps restore ailments of the body and mind to their regular working state. It usually entails using a person’s beliefs and the beliefs of their culture, and their understanding of substances around them that alter their body chemistry. Whether it be a doctor prescribing some pills, a shaman giving some herbs, an acupuncturist poking you with needles, or a priest trying to exhume the evil spirits from your body. The power of the mind is an amazing thing as well. A lot of medicinal practices only work if a person truly believes it will and convinces themselves it will (placebo effect)
Garden – A garden is an area intended to show the beauty of nature as well as produce natural things that can be of use. Gardens usually have some type of specific style or function. Most gardens are outside, incorporate large amounts of plants and possibly animals, and can include man made objects. There are many types of gardens, including, but in no way limited to: flower gardens, vegetable gardens, zen gardens (which use plants minimally), etc. There are many forms and functions of gardens.

When it comes to medicine, gardens are very important to some cultures, but not so much with others. It seems that cultures that use plant medicines and tend to gardens are a lot more in touch with what they are doing to the earth. They come to realize that the earth is giving them the things they need to survive, so they take better care of it.