If love were a garden, how would it look? Would it be blooming with heavy-scented and many-coloured flowers, all the better to beckon the butterflies and bees?
Would it have berry bushes, stubby, green-leaved, and bird-filled because they were so heavily laden with fruit? Or, would it be an unassuming strip of earth, brown and lumpy and hard, with spring’s wonders patiently waiting to burst their way through once the sun warmed the soil?
Is love’s garden only something we see in our mind’s eye, or is it something real that we create?
My favourite writer and award-winning essayist, Barry Lopez, has suggested that Eden, the legendary verdant garden of plenty, is not so much a place as it is a conversation.
“It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern of relationships, made visible in conversation,” he says, adding, “To live in Eden is to live in the midst of good relations, of just relations scrupulously attended to, imaginatively maintained through time.”
Now, imagine if everyone was walking around in their own Garden of Eden, in their own beautifully tended space of relationships, not only between people, but between all of Earth’s glorious gifts? Relationships between all that exists – from mother and child, to man and horse, and even between the sun and the sea – they’ve all become clear to me now.
When all that is around us is tended with love and attention, I wonder if we might just be creating The Love Fest of All Time? But, before we can do all this, I think we have to go back a step or two, back to consider the fundamentally different types of relationships we can have with the world around us.
The two main types of relationships are the “I-it” and the “I-thou” way of relating to one another, a concept also brought to my awareness by Barry Lopez. Here’s how it works. When we have an I-it relationship with something or someone, there is no equality. Instead, there is a thinking that the I is better than the it, and that the I can do what it wants with it. Compare that, though, with the I-thou kind of relationship – one that embodies respect for both, one that works together with each other, one that neither supplicates nor overpowers.
Is it just me, or do you find, too, that the I-thou relationship is more loving and gentle and kind, and much easier to be in?
I know I’d rather be in an I-thou relationship. Wouldn’t you? For that matter, wouldn’t anyone or anything?
It’s a bigger responsibility to be in an I-thou relationship, though. For then we have to do what’s right, not just for Number One, but for all that is around us.
Our Garden of Eden would begin and grow from our relationships with family, friends, animals, plants, crops, forests, soils, water supplies, the air that we breathe... I could go on and on and on, but I’m sure you get my drift.
If our soils and waters are tended with respect and care, will our plants and forests not grow healthy and strong, and will we not be the better for it?
I think the answer is pretty obvious.
But, what’s not obvious, I think, is that we each have a responsibility to create our own Garden of Eden wherever it is we go.
To help deal with this one, here’s yet another lesson I’ve learned from Barry Lopez that I’d like share with you.
“We cannot save things. Things pass away. We can only attend to relationships, to the relationships between things....Conversations are efforts towards good relations.
“They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate... If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.”
To think that we might create our own Eden through the act of conversation seems too simple to be true.
Yet, when I think this, my mother’s teachings of elegance arising from simplicity come to mind. Creating our own garden of love—now that’s in our best interest.
