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| Synopsis: A psychotherapist and award-winning gardener turns the simple act of nurturing plants into a meditative tool for self-exploration and healing. Marilyn Barrett invites readers into the healing space she created in her own backyard and shows how, in a time of illness and stress, she used gardening to renew her health and balance. |
COME INTO THE garden with me. Don't worry about not knowing the way: Your heart remembers, even if your head has forgotten. When you were small and first had time to create your dreams, you were at one with the earth you played in and with each leaf, bird and cloud you saw. This is the garden to which I invite you to return.
Imagine a place to which you can bring stress, sorrow, loneliness, and confusion and from which you can leave with a sense of resolution, understanding, and calm. Imagine a place where you can express your own unique nature, create beauty, grow pure food , and gain control over your life. In my life, the garden has been such a place.
As I learned of the garden's power to heal and renew, I not only moved through and resolved a serious health crisis but also brought harmony and balance into my life. I let go of many "shoulds" and "oughts" and began to live a life closer to my true inner needs and to the natural world of which I am a part.
My purpose in writing this book is to share what I have learned. Gardening is a healing art, both physically and spiritually, and once you learn its principles, you, too, will be able to develop and maintain a way of life that is in harmony with your own inner nature and with Nature around you.
Is much of your life determined by others' needs? Are you just getting by? Do you have a nagging feeling that something is wrong, that from the time you were little you have been swept along, marching to someone else's beat, never having the time or the tools to figure out what is really right for you?
Or are you feeling burned out and tired of the rat race--as though you have been running on a tread mill, achieving the illusion of progress and happiness but not really feeling good deep within you?
That's the way it was for me. It was only in retrospect, after things began to come apart and I became ill, that I saw how out of balance my life was with my own true nature.
The crisis of my illness and my desire to get well enabled me to see that my real wants and needs, my true, essential spirit, my very self had been covered over by layers and layers of stress, disappointment, and compromise. I no longer remembered what it was that I wanted and needed to be happy. I decide to try and rediscover it.
I left my job in a smoggy, semidesert town and moved to Los Angeles, where I bought a house two miles from the ocean. The house had a large, denuded backyard littered with broken glass, dead weeds, and rubble. Except for one or two shrubs and a small clump of birches, the space, which was about half the size of an average city house lot, was barren. Yet the soil was heavy clay, and I could see that with some attention it could become good garden loam.
Guided by my visions that I'd had in my mind since childhood, I decided to create my own garden space. I hauled away the trash, uprooted dead plants, cleared weeds, and enriched the soil. The garden evolved as I went along. Generous neighbors donated calla lilies, iris, impatiens, and Mexican evening primrose. As houses in the neighborhood were demolished to make way for condominiums, I rescued from the bulldozers violets, tiger lilies, geraniums, roses and fuchsias. Bricks for walkways I retrieved from the same sites. Each day I spent time in the garden digging, planting, and weeding, adding cosmos, lobelia, calendula, and forget-me-nots to the beds and borders I created.
As I dug and planted, I began to get in touch with the strength in my body and to feel the benefits of being out of doors. My energy began to return, and my depression lifted.
Working in the garden that first year, clearing and planting, I discovered that I was also working out the answers to many questions and problems. As my garden began to take tentative shape, my psyche, too began to form an image of where I was in my life. As drooping irises, calla lilies, and sword ferns survived the shock of transplanting and as earthworms multiplied in the soil that I dug and fertilized, I gained comfort and release from some of the fear and uncertainty I felt. Then, later, as these plants took root and sent out new green shoots, as I dug borders and laid out pathways, some impending shape of my own future began to emerge within me. In spring, when the tall callas unfurled their creamy blooms and the jowled and ruffled heads of blue and yellow irises opened from tightly sheathed buds, as flowers and leaves stirred and rustled in the gentle, sun-warmed breeze and as lemon blossoms from the small tree I'd planted in autumn scented the air, I saw that I, too, had completed a cycle of growth.
Through this connectedness with the rhythms of Nature, I gained balance and perspective and was able to see just how distanced from my needs I had become.
So it is for many of us. So it is with the planet. The stresses we face force us to violate and become alienated from our own basic human needs. Daily we hear of global warming, the greenhouse effect, and the destruction of the ozone layer. We have be come unable to regulate our outer environment as well as our inner environment.
This book will show you how to restore and maintain a healthful connection with Nature and with yourself. It will help you reduce stress, feel more content, and come to know your personal boundaries and limits of tolerance.
You will learn to use the actual garden, in your back or front yard, on your balcony or windowsill. And you will also learn how to create and use a mental garden, one you can carry with you and that will help you to restore and retain your balance as you move through your daily life.
Why the garden? It is immediate and tangible--it's not an idea, or a theory, or an abstraction. It is a microcosm of Nature's processes, a little world you can make on your own human scale. In the garden, you can learn to flow with the rhythms of Nature; you can attune yourself to Nature's harmony.
The garden is a place where you can, literally and figuratively, come to your senses and find delight in them. The seasons are dependable guides from which we can learn to lead a wise and thoughtful life.
NEXT CHAPTERS of Creating Eden
Publisher: Harper San Francisco, A Division of Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-250076-7
Contact: Marilyn Barrett 408/656-9120 for more information about counseling and support for writers, artists and those who aspire. Watch your book store for the paperback edition of Creating Eden: The Garden as a Healing Space by Marilyn Barrett, Ph.D.
"In Creating Eden, Marilyn Barrett shows gardening to be a healing art that works by putting the gardener into a loving and respectful relationship with nature. This book is poetic in its use of symbolism and its appeal to deep feeling. I loved it from beginning to end." June Singer, author, Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology
"Marilyn Barrett shows how caretaking of the earth takes care of us...She sensitively awakens us to the idea that we each have the potential to create something magnificent with our lives, when we lovingly work step by step, in rhythm with the natural cycles...This inspiring and uplifting book can be read again and again as we remind ourselves of the work that needs to be done...It is a book that I would recommend to all, and particularly to people, like those here at The City of Hope, who are dealing with critical health concerns." Rabbi Norman T. Mendel, Director, Biothetics Institute, City of Hope, Los Angeles
"Marilyn Barrett has written a brilliant and beautiful meditation on nature and the human spirit in her book. Her writing has poetic quality combined with powerful insight." Barbara Moulton, Editor, Harper San Francisco
"May I be one of the first to predict wild success for your book! Your knowledge and sensitivity shine through on every page." Diane Hollander, Gardener and Nursery Owner
"I hear you speaking directly to me, and am sure other readers will sense that intimacy! You write so deceptively simply and clearly, yet reach the inner landscape with what seems like a very personal focus." Dr. Jo Lessner, Past President, California Assoc. of Marriage & Family Therapists
"I lingered with each page, each chapter, like a fine wine. You have captured east and west and blended them into a truly 'available' work of art." Joy Hanna, Psychotherapist
"While recovering from surgery for ovarian cancer, I reread your wonderful book, Creating Eden. It was so much more comforting than all the self-help/think your way out of cancer books which had been pouring in in the mail from friends. Thank you for writing this thoughtful and special book." Fran Wagstaff, Executive Director, Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition, San Jose, CA
"I am inspired to strive to create lovely gardens in my life, both physically and spiritually, as a result of both reading your gentle and lovely book and your personal appearance at our luncheon." Patrice Kaminer, Temple Beth El, Salinas, CA
"I know I've verbally told you what a fine book it is, but now I need to commend you on the graceful, poetic language, the fine insights evoked in the reader and a book to truly cherish." Freda Mallen, Writer
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Creating Eden The Garden as a Healing Space
COPYRIGHT © 1992 MARILYN BARRETT |
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