Sacred Musings from the Garden 
Part III

To perceive origin is to be reflective of the past and observant of the present all for a fruitful future. Origin is known as the original substance, the purest sustenance, the primal force of existence, and this prima materia, as the ancient alchemists knew it, is the wellspring of existence. Our inter-relationships and co-dependencies of human and creature, mammal and plant, soil and worm is an irrevocable entanglement of our original destinies displayed unequivocally in the vital participative flow of the seasons and the enigmatic sways of the pulsating moon. It marries the cosmos with communal existence. 

Origin is an invisible tendency to express life force through an inner source that beats to Nature’s drum. Plants in origin are the weeds of this planet. These herbs are easy to find, quite prolific, and they know opportunity. They pop up anywhere and everywhere and with the right conditions they will thrive. To work with these plants is to know utmost ease and vitality as they contain great quantities of nutritive juices with the least amount of work.

Wild and free, these herbs have meandered through the crevices of humankind for centuries serving as constant reminders of where we came from and reveal to us effortless engagement with season. Every cultivated plant has come through this parentage as a cultured expression of what once was. Each time a human consciously cross breeds plants, through our destiny to work with and beautify Nature, a dilution of source energy takes place. The plants that one sees in the garden, and especially the vegetable garden, are in different proportions removed from origin. Some plants like Corn were bred thousands and thousands of years ago, and others such as Swiss Chard were bred less than a couple hundred. Each plant is also in differing proportions separated from source energy based on how many times it has been cross bred or hybridized. Thus all plants known to us come from origin plants and the ones that remain in origin are suffused with primal energy. 

Much of our food now is cultivated and bred for taste buds that have become dulled to the wild juices of once fertile lands. The creatures and insects of today, having a tendency to take just the right amount of wild weeds, take far more than is normal of cultured plants to satiate the same inner nutritional hunger. This is more often the case if these plants lack nutritive soils and are grown without biodynamics in mind. This has formed the extensive use of pesticides, the “eradication” of pest was from the erosion of nutrition, yet this created and perpetuates disastrous consequences towards the wild web. Pests should be looked at as entities performing an obedience to right an imbalance and eradicating anything is an illusion, in Nature everything exists either latent or in expression, participating or waiting for the right opportunity. Nothing also is ever wasted or removed, every death rebirths life, and each life tends towards deaths renewal. Nature balances imbalances, always, or destruction occurs, the great balancer. One can truly see the fallacy of modern day agriculture.

To grow and take in myriads of weeds not only supports the diversity of the wild web but revitalizes the human being participating in their growth and taking them in. Placing or allowing these herbs to grow in the garden is an act of reverence to the origins of our kind. It is a way to remain eternally vital. Eating what is in season while conversing with these ancient plants and observing their obedience to the seasons of Nature through their life cycles is true knowledge. Nettles, horsetail, juniper, and pine are just a few of the origin plants. They have inborn protective properties that enable them to thrive on the planet, thus why they are oftentimes perceived as invasive. They are loaded with bioavailable nutritive vitamins and minerals, amino acids, and all the things that the human needs to continually evolve on the planet as part of the grand design. 

In plants is revealed the flow of life. They follow the rhythm of the watery sprouts of spring into the acids and sugars of summer, they move to produce oils in autumn which harden and solidify them for the storage and hibernation of winter. And you see this mirrored in creatures and insects. The quickening of the equinoxes is a growth phase, spring and autumn, sunrise and sunset, infant and elder. The pause of the solstices is a recollection and gathering of energy within, summer and winter, midday sun and midnight moon, adult and the in-between pause of death into life. 

So just as a plants growth stalls during the night and the highest and hottest aspect of the sun, so does a worms work, they rest during the solstices and are active during the equinoxes. The squirrel protects itself from midday heat and gathers and frolics nearer to the equinox dawn and dusk. Animals behaving in origin, being allowed to choose what to eat, when to eat, and where to eat will also be full of health and vitality as they are integrated in the seasonal changes. Animals caged and in pens given the same food day in and day out ignore their innate primal responses to life, this weakens the animal, its spirit suffers, and disease, illness, as well as myriads of other ill-effects are the byproduct. One can see why one should be very selective about the meat ingested, should one choose to consume animals, since one brings in the energy of what one consumes. It is also revealed why animals should be allowed to make their own choices for they are designed to act aligned and the human best support that.

Humans that perceive this can act congruently with Nature’s call for our modern world has become deprived of this wisdom. When these cycles are aligned with the individual has the utmost health and wellbeing for to act in this way is action in origin. Consuming origin plants in their appropriate seasons, moving with the rhythms of the year, playing with fertilities through the pulses of the moon, all of these ways are the actions one can take to return to wholeness. Gender in origin is a woman foraging, moving, busying, and tending to the family. It is the man that stills himself enough so he has an unwavering focus enabling him to shoot the bow and arrow and nail the target. When acting upon these primal urges Nature supports for life is flowing from within to without. It is organic and ever-changing, evolving and revolving. The modern day mechanistic life moves from the outer and imposes itself upon the unique individual. This stifles life force as it creates a one size fits all approach that is far too rigid to survive Nature’s impermanent pulsations. 

Returning to origin is a rebirth of wholeness, a reintegration into Nature’s wild web, a remembering of intuitive wisdom. Rekindling the seeds of origin is an out-breath of life, an in-breath of vitality. Origin is primal source. To know this center is to be an essential piece in the outflowing gift of life on this planet.

Sacred Musings from the Garden
Part II

Up, around, and down, a doorway without a door, an archway into the infinite. This portal through world’s transports one into the silent mysteries of the natural world. Step inside, cross the boundary, and become initiated into the the universal rhythms, the cosmic hymns, and the ebb and flow of galaxies. The organic material world reveals these pulsations through its interaction with the atmospheres around. An archway is one of the most powerful symbols you can place as the gateway into your cultivated garden space. 

As you enter, it becomes rather apparent that the obedience in the garden is to cosmic and planetary influences. Nothing natural ever rebels to these forces, rather they are integrated into their form as wisdom manifested. Each organic being birthed, lives, reproduces, and returns to the soils as compost. This is the web that ever-sustains. 

How beautiful is it that when you watch a bee move pollen from flower to flower you are watching a sexual act of floral reproduction. Or when you see a bird moving soil for worms and bugs it is doing so in that in may feed itself and it’s young, and in turn the soils are tilled. How blessed is this obedience, for without each act the world would not be strung together, it all would fall apart. In the garden, as in nature, everything is given equal opportunity to participate, and all things are performing an act integral to the whole. 

And so when you walk through that archway it is of utmost importance to leave the worrying’s of the civilized and the modern behind. For when you enter the magic and sacred whisperings of life, the mysteries will only be available if you are open to it. Eyes piercing the interplay, heart expansive to secrets, palms available for participation, and ears resonating to the quiet stirrings will feed the soul and its emanations. 

From being on the fringes of the miraculous you pierce the magic. The way wind creates wood, substantiating vegetation and form. How heat pushes a plant into productivity and reproductive expression. How the dampness that sets in as the heat bubble bursts restores the earth and its inhabitants. And then when autumn’s dryness withers leaf, plant, and ripens fruit, there are seeds exposed revealing endless fertility. Then to see winter and its quiescent hibernation is to know rest, that all must hibernate to become replenished for spring’s birthing. That water is only possible because of cold descending down, and the depths of water represent the yearning for source. And as each seed from autumn dances to the depths of winter it is so that in spring the winds fling life, seed, and expression out into the welcoming participation of the planetary whole. 

When we set the garden up for life to enter then we have less work in the long run. Rather the miraculous inter-dependence of creature, plant, and atmosphere reveals the inner obedience of working towards harmony, using checks and balances. Thus when you create a space you keep in mind every living thing around you and create it in such a way that all are welcome to play and rejoice upon your soils. The irony for the one tending is that the tended creates the tender, and what ushers forth is a deep reverence from the chamber of the heart, a knowingness that one comes from the soils of the earth and there one will return. 

Walk through that archway and expand out into the mysterious life force pulsating around. Vitality replenished, spirit soothed, soul fed, you are initiated into the otherworldly. Let it take you over and when you become part of the cycles of the moon and the rhythms of the seasons you enter a knowledge that no one can ever take away from you.