Sanctuary Garden: Meeting the Soul's Needs

Meeting the Needs of the Soul with a Sanctuary Garden

by Christopher Forrest McDowell & Tricia Clark-McDowell

Don't go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don't bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens.
Kabir (Robert Bly, The Kabir Book)

How does a garden give sanctuary to the soul?

We know that when we are feeling down, hurting, or simply world-weary, we need solace. Perhaps we feel melancholy, or conversely full of childlike exuberance - here, too, we sometimes need a place to express ourselves and simply be one with our spirit. We can't always be preoccupied with the needs of our body, our daily duties and obligations, or the needs of others such as family, friends, or an employer. Our worldly activities, whether we have realized it or not, must find balance with the sacred or spiritual. Pure and simple, this much needed balance is an issue of survival for our soul!

In the last chapter we shared how the garden is our opportunity as humans to acknowledge and embrace the spirit of Nature and the nature of Spirit. Over the years, we have begun to articulate for others just what it is that our soul needs and how the sacred place of a sanctuary garden can begin to meet those needs. I want to share some of our discoveries with you. Perhaps then you will be better prepared to see the potential for your own sanctuary garden to evolve using the design elements shared in this book.

The Need for Sacred Time & Space

A special setting, and especially one that we have created ourselves, always seems to give us permission to take the time and space to be in it. In a sacred space like a sanctuary garden, we come back into owning our time - and thus, owning ourselves. As both wellness practitioners and gardeners, we know numerous people with stressful jobs who find spiritual rejuvenation in their backyards. This is their place of sanctuary they immediately visit upon returning home from work.

For most people sacred time and space seems difficult, if not impossible to come by. Some relegate it to an hour or so in church on Sunday, a visit to a park or someone else's nice garden, or perhaps only a yearly vacation. In the latter instance people may look for sacred time and space only in far away locations like a wilderness area, national park, or some exotic place such as Hawaii or Europe where a different pace and culture finally lulls them into a more peaceful outlook on life.

It is with good reason that people value the special time and space of vacation. The word itself comes from the Latin vacatio, meaning "an emptying out of the mind." Indeed, what makes time and space sacred is the emptying out of the drone of everyday obligations, duties, stress, and the like - the types of activities and experiences of a secular lifestyle. In their place we can be filled with gratitude and wonder for the beauty of life around us.

For a good part of my life I believed that taking special time and space meant going far away from home after a long build-up of frustration and stress. Gradually, however, I became aware that I needed sacred time and space everyday and close at hand. My high-strung nature, like a guitar itself strung too tight, often reached a breaking point in my activities and relationships, until I finally began to find more effective ways to calm myself. Meditation came first, but gardening was the next instrument I discovered. Unfortunately, for a long time I applied the same level of compulsiveness to growing plants as to the rest of my more worldly work. In fact, gardening became an obsession.

At first I worked very hard in my garden. It was a pursuit more intellectual and physical than spiritual. Nevertheless, beginning the process of gardening quickened my own evolution towards soulfulness. Perhaps this was inevitable. In any case, once begun there was no turning back on the journey. I meditated, I gardened. I tilled my soul, I tilled the soil. It is as if I had inadvertantly tapped into some archetypal concept of time and space, and my own cheaply fashioned stop-and-go watch finally began to break down. Gradually, gardening became more like meditation. Breathe in, breathe out. My breath became the needed breath of the plants, their breath my own needed infusion for survival. Beyond time and space, both gardening and meditation became reciprocal exchanges of energy. And both Nature and I benefited in the timeless communion.

Actually, I have worn a watch for a total of three weeks in my life. It was given to me by an eighty-six year old woman at the retirement center where I worked as activity director. She hoped the watch (once her husband's) would help me to be more "time responsible." She should have known better! I wore the watch for a few weeks until it went through the washing machine in one of my pockets. It never worked again. Consequently I knew once and for all that watches were not for me. Perhaps I should give myself at least a little credit. You see, in my heart I have always been in resistance to this all pursuasive and powerful force called time.

I organized a garden club at the retirement center. We had raised-beds built in a sunny corner of the grounds. I was amazed at how important this activity was to the elders. In wheelchairs and walkers they came, hobbling with canes, weakened from cancer, in recovery from heart attacks. One man was nearly blind. They each had their own poignant life story to tell, often fraught with difficulties. But in the garden, it was as if they were young again, having been released in an act of grace or mercy from the leathery skin of age and disease. Indeed, for each participant this was very special time in a very special place. Call it sacred if you will. Sometimes it took all the energy someone had just to water their raised-bed or to pull out a few weeds. But that didn't seem to matter. Through these simple activities the spirit was being healed, even as the body and mind were drawn into a paradise beyond time and place. These elders' gardens were giving them sanctuary.

Once we have found a bit of time or a sweet place that seems so special that it seems to grow of its own in our heart, we are certain to return again and again with a loyalty that is fierce. Gardening, I have learned, can do this to people. It has long done that for me. You see, worldly watches can never measure the time the soul spends with Nature. We don't write this activity on the calendar. It just happens because we have surrendered to it.

Surrender to the gentle call of your sanctuary garden, even if it is only at this moment an idea in your mind. Cultivate and honor your vision, however simple. Gather the few tools necessary (shovel, trowel, wheelbarrow, and the like), but don't get carried away with that. Your most important tool is your heart's desire - the desire to create a place where you can be more yourself than any other place you know. Get yourself a little bench or stool that you can easily move around the yard, viewing your potential sanctuary space from all angles at every time of the day and night. Let the dream articulate itself, little by little or in great bursts, however it comes.
I recently met a woman who had attended a talk I had given on creating sanctuary. Then she bought our very practical educational materials on natural gardening techniques. A few weeks later she came to one of our open gardens where she wandered to her heart's content. She sat next to our little waterfall and pond and read the entire brochure on the Cortesia Sanctuary Project. Finally, towards the end of the day, she told me she had just bought a house in town. "I am not going to plant anything in my yard for a year," she told me with assurance. "I want to better understand what is already there and get to know the spirit of the place." Yes, these were her words.
I was touched by this comment. Clearly, she was willing to slowly cultivate her connection to place, little-by-little, season-by-season, before making any changes. If you are the patient type, sit and watch, listen and learn in the place you envision as your sanctuary garden. And whenever you feel ready to dive in, do so humbly with a beginner's mind, open heart, and an empty bowl of gratitude.

Once you begin to see the garden of your soul and the garden outside your door as a beautiful haven awaiting your reverent love and intentions, you will never be the same. You will have awakened the Spirit of Place that gives solace and comfort to all beings who enter, visit, or dwell within. And small miracles can begin to happen. One discovery leads to another and another. This is what Forrest and I call sanctuary work and it may well be some of the most important work you ever do.

The Need for Re-enchantment

The sanctuary garden is a natural lure which may gently draw us into its magical web of enchantment. We become like little children in its midst awed by Nature's exquisite artistry, which in turn is enhanced by our appreciation and thoughtful touch. Thomas Moore, in his wonderful book, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life, speaks eloquently about the soul's need for enchantment:

. . . To make local nature a concrete element in daily life is a necessary initial step in the re-enchantment of our individual lives . . . Enchantment is to a large extent founded in the spirituality inherent in earthly nature . . . Our task is to re-expand our very idea of spirituality to include the lowliest of things and the most particular and familiar haunts of nature."

Most of us remember periods in our childhood where clearly we were in love with whatever Nature existed around us. As a girl I delighted in playing with earthworms, climbing trees, smelling flowers, and catching fireflies on warm summer nights. I passionately loved watering, hence my father gave me the job of hand-watering all the new grass and trees he planted. Watching the rainbow-laden water spray out of the hose nozzle and soak into the dark earth was an experience of which I never tired. I still enjoy watering today, though in the interest of conservation I now know how to use deep watering techniques.

Anthropologist Ashley Montigue once said that adults are merely diseased children. I think he is right if part of the disease is caused by a lack of Nature in our diet. I never grew out of my childhood love for Nature. However, for many adults this precious relationship recedes far into the background and may be entirely lost for years on end. Yet it is precisely during our adult years that we need more than ever to maintain our sense of enchantment with the world around us, and in particular the natural world.

Thomas Moore partially defines enchantment as "a state of rapture and ecstasy in which the soul comes to the foreground, and the literal concerns of survival and daily preoccupation at least momentarily fade into the background." Don't we all crave such an experience? Not just once or twice in our life or each year, but repeatedly. Not artificially induced by drugs or alcohol, or by consuming with wild abandon. Not by plunging ourselves into the world in the same way we hurry the kids off to school and rush headlong off to work. No. The soul occasionally needs that which is other-worldly, even as this itself is firmly rooted in the world - rooted as in the Nature that surrounds our home.

Every feature of the sanctuary garden, however practical its design and implementation, can indeed be conceived of and viewed through the crystalline lens of enchantment. We must simply relearn what we knew as children. The sanctuary garden becomes our healer in this sense. It lets the imagination have free reign over and beyond the influence of a mind filled with schedules, worries and routines. Such a garden experience allows us to marvel and see anew with awe and wonder at the same time peace and tranquility, reverence and hope is planted tenderly in our heart. Indeed, such a garden allows us ourselves to be a garden kept safe by the hands of God as She dresses Herself as Nature.

So imagine, if you will, meandering pathways, garden art that breathes new life into a flower bed, filtered sunlight warming a small pond with a tiny tree frog croaking out its exuberant song and a butterfly sunning itself on a nearby rock. Imagine a chair or bench that enfolds your body and spirit in a state of being instead of doing. Whatever you can imagine, you can begin to create it. Don't worry about your low budget or lack of space or the need to ration out your precious freetime. Those thoughts are the too familiar symptoms of the disease of adulthood.

Re-enchantment with the Nature outside your own back door will inspire you to find the niches of creative time wherein the process of soul-building and soil-building become one. Here the practical and spiritual are unified, and you pass over a threshold into a new way of perceiving everyday life. Like the curious children who climbed into the wardrobe closet in C.S. Lewis's childhood classic, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, you will suddenly find yourself in Narnia - a magical land of possibilities. Just allow your curiosity to be greater than your fear. Let your heart supercede your doubts. As the famous Greek novelist, Nikos Kazantzakis, reminds us, "The new earth exists only in the heart." Be alert - you do need daily sanctuary. Your heart and soul depend upon it.

The Need for Solitude, Stillness and Reflection

The soul has an inherent need for balance. At once it desires worldly immersion and enchantment. It is compelled to do. But the soul also needs to know it can just be. This being means occasional retreat from the frontlines of life - retreat into solitude, stillness and reflection.

A sanctuary garden allows both doing and being to find natural balance in its Keeper. However, the design of a sanctuary garden especially incorporates opportunities to just be. Special sitting areas are important. So are meandering paths. A central landscape feature such as a waterfall, pond, tree, or rock formation are each important in drawing a visitor to sit quietly in observation. Lastly, a hidden "room" or nook in the garden is perfect for soliciting solitude and reflection.
What is it like to just be? In Sisters of the Earth, a collection of women's prose and poetry about Nature, editor Lorraine Anderson talks about "making a conscious choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up." How can we offer ourselves up to the subtle rhythmic sway and flow of Nature? Can this really be done in a society in which overworked or stressed-out individuals perform all their duties without ever once planting foot on terra firma from the time they leave their home to the time they return? Perhaps the secret is in taking small steps towards creating opportunities for stillness and contemplation. Just a few minutes here and there - to breathe more deeply, to think more slowly, to perceive Nature around us with greater awareness, or perhaps to perceive the world within our soul.

What if we begin by placing a single chair or bench outside so that it faces a small flower bed in our yard, a special tree, or even a seasonal planter? I met a young man recently, an apartment dweller who, in absence of a garden, has tendered a small potted plant on his bedroom window sill for years. With warmth in his eyes, he shared with me that this was his sanctuary garden which he sat before in a few minutes of silence each day, quietly noticing a new leaf node here or a flower bud there. There is a lesson here - to give ourselves permission to sit as often as possible before a bit of Nature without judging ourselves as to the time duration - to offer our attention unconditionally. Season by season, we can observe the same scene, letting it teach us through its subtle shifting.

When I was a new mother, my partner and I at the time left the city, took our two-month old son and moved to a wild piece of property on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Miles from civilization, we lived contentedly in a tiny cabin with a dirt floor. On the crudely built deck that literally hung over the edge of a steep little valley, I placed a single planter box, fashioned from an old wooden crate. Because our garden space was to be carved out of a deep thicket of alders, and much water had to be hauled by hand to water it, I contented myself in the early stages with this one-planter garden full of bright annual flowers. I sat for hours, nursing my son, gazing across the valley, and admiring my flower box and its daily growth. It was one of the happiest periods of my life, where I was utterly content to be still, reflecting on the miraculous new life in my arms, in the beauty of Nature around me, and in my synthesis of human and Nature, as reflected perfectly in my simple little flower box.

I fully expect to return someday to such a one-planter garden with full awareness that it is the consciousness we bring to our sanctuary garden that magnifies its incredible power to heal the lonely or broken heart, and still the weary mind. Where is that special form of Nature that beckons you into being still and thankful for life?

The Need for Reverent Communion & Celebration

The soul is empowered by deep and meaningful relationships. Be they relationships with people, animals, plants, objects, beautiful sunsets, and the like, we are inspired and renewed by gestures of respect, courtesy and appreciation. The sanctuary garden is a special place where reverential stewardship is practiced between humans and Nature. The word stewardship (or steward) itself literally means "keeper of the place." Therefore, in our garden we can demonstrate a commitment to earth-friendly attitudes and actions. Being a reverent Keeper represents that added level of conscientious planning and caretaking necessary to make the garden feel worthy of sacredness and communion.

The reciprocal exchange between human and Nature is one of the most profound experiences to be had. This is communion at its deepest core - when, as theologian and ecologist Thomas Berry suggests, we perceive "the numinous quality of every earthly reality." A covenant of reverence with Nature is what allows each of us to feel part of Her mystique and to celebrate Her mystery. It allows us to use that part of our soul that historian Theodore Rozak calls our rhapsodic intellect.

Nobel laureate and scientist, Barbara McClintock speaks eloquently of this form of rhapsodic mystique in her work with corn cells: "I found the more I worked with them, the bigger and bigger the chromosomes got and when I was really working with them I wasn't outside. I was part of the system . . . and these were my friends. As you look at these things they become a part of you . . . (such that ) everytime I walk on grass I feel sorry because I know the grass is screaming at me." This is the type of communion which writer and poet Gretel Ehrlich writes about when she says "I must first offer myself up, accept all that comes before me."

Repeatedly, Forrest and I suggest that the sanctuary garden, perhaps more so than any other type of garden, is a key link to the Divine, some indescribable Creative Force. In such a garden spiritual communion and celebration comes easily because it quenches something so much more needed by the soul than intellectual preoccupation with horticultural techniques or manipulation of plants and the environment.

Indeed, we can see into and relate to the world and life with eyes wide and accepting. Whether we commune with Nature with unspoken intuition or informed knowledge, we remain humble to the sacredness of our reverential covenant and relationship with Her. This form of transcendent wisdom cannot be gained in gardening books or at nurseries. It is gained on one's brown-stained knees or in the still observation of a subtle shift of energy in the air, within the soil or drop of rain, or emitted by an insect, rock, or plant. As Albert Einstein reminds us, "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger is as good as dead." If anything, your sanctuary garden can give you daily rebirth into the realms of the seen and unseen of Nature and your soul.

The Need for Re-Creation & Co-Creation

Our spiritual energy needs to be renewed each day. Our soul needs to be uplifted, and our wounded or tired spirit needs periodic regeneration. Finding sanctuary in a lovely and peaceful garden setting - one that seems to enfold the soul in magic, celebration, art, curiosity, and contemplation - can do the job. However, this is a big departure from our cultural stereotypes of recreation: television, sports, windowshopping, going to the mall or a lounge, etc. While there may be a place for all this, perhaps in our quest for a balanced life we might consider asking ourselves, Which activities and experiences truly nurture and renew us on the deepest level?
I am still amazed at how much time I managed to waste in the past with unnecessary activities and pursuits. However, all the while I was sincerely honing my discrimination and my inner life and vision. So I have no real regrets. But I think more carefully now before leaving the calmness of our sanctuary to drive into town. I will choose the peace of the garden or our home almost any day over the lure of going to a movie or a party or yet another meeting.

To co-create with Nature has become the highest and most regenerating activity I can perform. It has deepened my power as a woman. Indeed, to cultivate this abiding partnership with the natural world has set the standard for all other relationships in my life. The very act of co-creation asks that we listen constantly to the myriad voices around us. They seem to guide us wordlessly, intuitively, in fostering the right relationships and balance of plants to natural features, of wildlife habitat to human haven, of what is left wild and what must be cultivated.
I did not learn any of this in gardening books, I am sad to say. Most of the books I have come upon are full of techniques but lacking in applied philosophy. I have come to see my garden as a small library of natural history whose plants, insects, beings and forces make-up the many volumes that command my attention each visit. Forrest reminds me that Nature is awash in storytelling and so often, in our need as gardeners to constantly be in control or to putter around with this or that, we choose not to listen. In his journal, Forrest writes: "There is a universe little known in the earth at our feet. We talk much more than rocks have the patience to listen."
If we believe our philosophy of life can only be had at the hands of other humans, we are certainly like the fish which discovers water lastly. We live in an ocean of Nature, and each day we are renewed and re-created - physically and spiritually, whether we know it or not - in Her image.
Nonetheless, each of us evolves philosophically, enriched by or orphaned from our relationship with Nature. Our garden, as a haven from our incessant relationship with typically human affairs, has the potential to re-create us daily. Herein, every aspect of Nature, truly seen and felt through the gesture of reverence, leads us back to the sanctuary of our soul. In Sisters of the Earth, Gretel Ehrlich reminds us: "To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself over and over again."

What, then, is really the value of seeking sanctuary in daily life? We know from our own experience that finding daily asylum, whether it be in meditation, a quiet corner of a room in the house, or in one's garden continues to refuel our sense of spirit. We also know that in sanctuary we can perceive greater control in our life. We can love ourselves anew by embracing our sacredness. We re-envision the world as perhaps a more hopeful and peaceful place to live. In sanctuary we often become re-enchanted with beauty. We create a sacred connection with Nature. And we deepen those values we hold dear in a worthy relationship. Sanctuary naturally deepens our spiritual side, but it also allows us to see our sense of service to others, and to embrace their sacredness with more clarity, love and compassion. Finally, the gentle power of sanctuary does wonders to restore our peace of mind. This is perhaps the greatest gift taking sacred time and space can give to us. In sanctuary that elusive peace we seek in all aspects of our life seems easily attainable.

Now it is time to specifically share some of the design elements we feel are key to creating a sanctuary garden. Each not only has a very practical side but also a spiritual justification. We believe this is the way gardening should be, our human opportunity to grow as a soul, rooted by a reverence for this planet Earth we call our home. To borrow from an old Scottish saying: "Love this Earth as if you won't be here tomorrow; show reverence for your Garden as if you will be here forever."