Gardens, Rituals

"My straw hat low on my brow, O go down the grassy,

  vine-covered

Slope, mount the beautiful sloping stone stairs, step after step.

Already the house has vanished; I see the clipped boxwood

Tower rigid in the glowing sky, and the garden takes me,

The steep vineyard slope receives me; at once my thoughts are

Far from the house, from breakfast, books, mail and the paper."

Herman Hesse's Hours in the Garden and Other Poems (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979, p. 11) touches on the beauty inherent in nature and in ritual, for gardens, abundant with herbs and flowers, have about them the scent of the divine, an earthy undertone, a too brief sweetness, and time in them is time spent apart and with God.

From its description, Hesse's garden comprised a mountain space of varying cultivation, decay, and tangle.  He describes, for example, the life and ruin of a cactus, once healthy, later cut and rotting from the inside, around the tomb of which his poetic character plants columbine (". . . and I hope there won't be too much / Sun for it here, because its home is the forest floor").

My garden is a 6 x 12 foot deck adorned with wind chimes surrounding hanging baskets and railing planters laden this mid-summer with Dusty Miller and Petunias.  As small as it is, Anne and I have made it spacious; as common as it may be, I have found ways of inhabiting it and, I hope, picturing it that both enliven and sooth the spirit.

Every day brings change to the garden--more blooms, more leggy stems, even more bugs, for which I spray from time to time.  Nonetheless, it's timeless too: the morning's cup of coffee and pastry; the hours spent reading in an old canvas chair; the afternoon plate of olives and feta cheese; the dusk settling down with talk over Margaritas; even late at night beneath a lantern, the clay fired cup of cold white wine.

I have heard that "living is an art," but I have found many arts are what make living beautiful, and then too taking the full measure of time to enjoy each in its turn, which time spent becomes time eternal.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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Comments

[Anne]

Simply lovely:)