Healing Gardens

1. How is the winter manifesting in you and in the world around you?

            Winter is proving to be a very emotional and busy season inside of me. It was restful, dreamy and sleepy in November, December and the first part of January. Now it is the beginning of February. Mid winter is here. Ideas are screaming to be carried out, homework is due, travel plans are happening, my winter budding relationship is blossoming, and garden activities are jumping to life.  The mid-winter sun brings up the energy of the spring, the first essence of things to come.  Soon the rain will come, and activity will quiet down until spring. But right now the time is right to ACT! Do it! . 

            Ideas and dreams are rising to the surface in my relationship with my boyfriend, and in the garden.  The sun brings energy and excitement about my own garden and native plant landscape plans.  I want to be there, digging, transplanting and moving plants. It is the perfect time to carry out the ideas that have been brewing all summer long. . . Funny, transplanting happens on the opposite cycle that the rest of garden activities do. It is thought about in the summer, and carried our in the winter.  Summer dreams are manifested in the winter-time. And winter dreams are manifested in the spring and summer?   

2. What is your relationship with your journal? Is it deep and fulfilling? If not, what could you do to engage with it and learn from it more?

            My relationship with my journal is waning.  I would like to use it as a place for reflection in my own yard, which I am landscaping with native plants. I have a strong passion for my “homestead” place, and have worked on it for that past two years. In fact, I would like to adopt it as my project for class, to use my project and journaling time for class to further my own goals in my own garden.  To design and plan that land, and use time to purchase native plants, and get compost and fertilizer for the site.  I would still fulfill the assignments for the longhouse garden as required, but spend time doing work in my own garden instead, and producing whatever end report or document as requested for the class. 

3. What is medicine? What is a garden? Write a definition of each. Compare your definitions.  Insights?

            Medicine is any herb, chemical, touch, material, or energy exchange that is beneficial, or healing to any sentient being.

            A garden is any location with plants that are tended to by humans for human needs, and harvested for human and animal benefit. 

A garden can be medicine for any sentient being, and a garden can produce medicines for sentient beings as well.  Humans can harvest things from the garden to make medicines, and can be healed by the garden and their activities there. Thus, a garden is the source of medicine in at least two ways: in it’s own form and in the products that are harvested from it for human/sentient beings use.