Lessons of the Labyrinth

It's the last week of spring, but I am still wondering where winter went. We've been crazy busy on a long list of duties and obligations, but I am hard pressed to tell you what was accomplished without my calendar. I've lived one event reminder to the next, and I have narrowed my scope to just the next thing or two in order to keep from feeling overwhelmed. Finally here I am at the end of the season, and I have returned to Saultopaul, almost desperate to breathe, to walk, to think, to get some perspective back.

Without really thinking about it, I go to the labyrinth to walk. This is what we do. The first steps head me straight toward the goal: the center stones. But the path abruptly turns me to woods. As I walk around the circular paths, first in towards the center, then back out to the perimeter, the "goal" is always in sight. Yet the more progress I make, the farther out the path from the center leads, and the slower my pace.

 "Oh yeah......".

So now progress begins to be breathing, stepping, accounting for each rock along the edge of the path. Step by step, thought by thought, I am meant to process the vast woods before me, and at the same time, each stone and pebble so carefully laid out. Before long, I can feel the tug of the forest and each of the trees; the "wild" natural beauty so exposed by this cultivated, manicured showcase. I reach the center stones, only to turn and continue that luxurious swing of near and far on the path that will eventually let me go.

This is the release I come to find at Saultopaul. I want to think a million thoughts that don't make a story. I want to hold images of opposites in my head without a mirror. I want to read to remember how to put myself in someone else's head and completely forget what's in my own.

To that end, I brought Michael Pollan's book Second Nature with me to finish, since it didn't seem very interesting at a pace of 2 pages per week. This book is absolutely loaded with vision, logic, common sense, and the elegance of verbal mathematics. It's subtitle is A Gardener's Education, but as so defined, it is a thoughtful inquiry into "(a gardener's) proper place in nature";.... "peculiar attitudes towards the land that an American is born with; ....about "troubled borders between nature and culture".... and finally, "a single argument that the idea of a garden- as a place....where nature and culture can be wedded in a way that can be beneficial to both..."

 I haven't wrapped my head around the full implications yet, but that's part of the fun. Here are few turns he makes in his path thru this labyrinth of his gardening experiences:

In the chapter on "Compost and it's Moral Imperatives", he sets out the history of horticulture in America, and marks the turns of that path's dangerous edges into the almost religious fervor of the "natural" as opposed to "the cultivated". That curve is one headed straight for the center "goal" of redeeming the soil as a virtue, but abruptly turns to the idea that nature is a "cure" for culture, and aesthetics and man made design must be inherently "bad".

The chapter on "Green Thumb" mulls over the theoretically gifted gardener, vs the very real one who uses practical experience and pays attention to "what the plants want". This is a contradictory look- steps towards the core motives and away- at the person who tries to bend the will of nature to improve his garden by trying to be more and more a part of the natural process....."Nature creates without an end in view; fitness is but an after thought. The gardener in his own little world, like the artist in his, performs both functions, hatching the trials and then culling the errors . But as much as he seems like a god in his garden, practicing his own brand of natural selection, the green thumb entertains no illusion of omniscience or omnipotence." My artist/ gardener friend Susan has mastered her own "natural selection" in the most detailed and intricate patterns in her moss garden. Witness the exquisite design:

There are perspectives and arguments on the true definition of plant nativity, the vestiges of a belief in spirits of trees, genetic diversity as a boon and a bane, plant snobbery, marketing to plant snobs, the environmental ethic of "wilderness" and a new ethic that we could develop when the old one is not helpful. From my spring of restricted, linear thinking, from a job exploding with passionate experience, from a year bombarded by a world full of polarizing political correctness, it has been exhilarating to follow him thru the maze to the edge and back.

In the end, "form (as a definition for garden) is a kind of rhythm in which expectations are aroused and then somehow paid off or fulfilled.....Once begun the garden path must take us somewhere, and then it had better bring us home again." It's been just a short couple of days here at Saultopaul. I've embraced the blurred vision and the focused, the manicured and the wild. I've been to the center and back. I'm ready to go home again.