Sunday

Reverie in the Garden

Dear Friends,

Last Sunday’s balmy weather drew me into our backyard garden and into reverie. The sun was at mid-point in the afternoon western sky, and a soft, warm breeze coming off the desert to the east stirred the air, fluttering the leaves and making the yellow butterflies dance. A sense of grateful yielding to the moment swept over me as I sank into a cushioned Adirondack chair that faced our hillside, shaded by coast live oaks and stone pines. I switched on our little fountain and as it gurgled blissfully I opened my newly purchased copy of The Unconscious, an anthology of writings about the subliminal mind. It began with a passage from Hippocrates on dreams as a window into the soul.

Though my mind was absorbed in the text, my senses were attuned to the natural life stirring around me. Two scrub jays were calling each other in a screechy dialog, and I caught a flash of blue feathers as one of them changed locations. Above me in the sky a red-tailed hawk circled lazily on the updrafts, hunting for a meal in the chaparral below. On the ground near me a western fence lizard basked in the sun, doing push-ups. Then I heard the harsh cackling of a Cooper’s hawk and spotted the bird perched on a limb at the top of our cedar tree.

What came over me was a sense of the rightness of all these impressions, their undeniable reality, their complete sufficiency. The thought occurred to me that this present moment was inexpressibly sacred, a sanctuary against the world I read about every day in the morning newspaper. How long could I hold onto it before some “urgent matter” broke the spell?

I came to a passage by Rousseau in my book. It was from Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782). He wrote: “But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.”

Another dreamer, the poet Andrew Marvell, reflected on the power of the garden to induce in us a soul-satisfying reverie, and I leave you with his lines.

What wondrous life in this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons as I pass,

Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,

Withdraws into its happiness;

The mind, that ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find,

Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds, and other seas;

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.

Andrew Marvell, c. 1655

Arthur

www.arthurhoyle.com