Debbie Millman's Illustrated Love Book of Gardening as a Portal to Self-Discovery – The Marginalian

You may or may not find the meaning of life while walking the flower bed, but each time you throw your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something hungry for the sun, you resist the death of light and say “yes” to life.

Gardening may make you a good writer, but it will delight you with metaphors, those perfect words of meaning otherwise all writing – all thinking – would be a catalog copy of a still life.

You may or may not be able to stop the war by planting a garden, but each time you kneel to press the seeds into the ground and bend over to watch the ants kiss the peony flowers, you are calling for a stop to the war within; you learn to lean into weakness, to cultivate a stubborn fortitude, to surrender to a power greater than your will; you learn to trust time, which is our best form of trust in life. “The gardener,” wrote Derek Jarman in his deep journal to prepare his way through grief, “digs into another time, without past or future, beginning or end… Amen beyond prayer.”

That's why Debbie Millman (yes) started with her soft photos A Love Letter to the Garden (public library) in the very beginning, in that first atom of time was broken into the rib of eternity – the unity that sprouts everything.

You see, a seed is one species – a small beginning that encompasses a lifetime. Therefore, according to the comment of the great naturalist John Muir that “when we try to choose anything in itself, we find it connected to everything else in the universe,” it becomes impossible to think about this one thing without considering the nature and meaning of existence itself.

Page after painted page, Debbie's lifelong longing for the garden is slowly revealed as her process of becoming herself begins with the portal of wonder that opened when her grandmother told her that the apple seed she eats can grow into a tree.

The seeds and flowers come to emphasize the story of his life – the ending chapters, the beginning chapters, the problems of uncertainty, the destruction of loss, the destruction of love. They appear at good times, showing the important difference between signs and omens:

Walking a few days later, he stops in the middle of nowhere when he sees the peonies blooming again – only to realize that another mourner had placed plastic flowers where the real ones were blooming. In artifice, connection; in the simulacrum, a prayerful bow before the deeper truth we share – time and change, which is another way of saying love and loss.

After half of her life, living in her brownstone, Debbie takes care of herself from the depression by creating a small, optimistic flower garden with a bird bath and tending to it every day with blind devotion.

He falls in love again, marries his soulmate, moves to California for a season and starts growing vegetables.

You navigate the fear and uncertainty of this pandemic by watching the smallest things grow.

And when the world finally returns to its critical state, he walks through its forests and gardens, orchards and forests, to kneel on the woolly blanket of Ireland, to bow before the sacred lotus of Japan, to taste the Sanguine oranges of Morocco and the peaches of Tuscany Pesca Regina di Londa, to run his hands over the Cambodian elephant trees and elephant trunks. the fibonacci spines of the Mexican agave.

Again and again, she returns to her garden for comfort and repair. You learn to be patient. You learn how to look at things. Watching things come to life after a long germination, you begin to befriend time – the time it takes for the heart to heal, for the world to heal, for the end to end so that the beginning can begin. Watching things die despite his best efforts, he faces his lifelong fear of not being able to—that is, he faces the abyss between ego and universe, will and world, the abyss in which we live.

What comes out of him A Love Letter to the Garden (public library) is a gentle reminder that we are here to plant a garden in the abyss, and to trust time.