WILD SOULFUL GARDENING;

As a Sustainable and Spiritual Practice

Vivienne Elanta 12021131

Sustainability and Spirituality

Abstract:

This project argues that we live in an unsustainable culture because of its alienation from nature. Cities are particularly unsustainable, because their inhabitants destroy their natural environment. Value is placed only on culture, and nature is a mere instrument to be exploited for human satisfaction. I show that a spiritual practice through wild soulful gardening reconnects us to the earth in a more sustainable way. Through creating sacred spaces in our gardens, we can simultaneously cultivate and nurture qualities such as loving kindness and compassion within our inner heart-garden. To be in service to all of life within a small garden, helps heal this hyper-separation between nature and culture.

1 Project introduction with clear thesis statement. 241

Most people in current western societies live their lives separate and in denial of their dependence on the natural world, in which culture and nature are dichotomised. This is the case particularly in cities, where asphalt and concrete make up a large part of the landscape. We have systematically turned our bushlands and wetlands into concrete jungles. We live in a culture obsessed with technology and progress. These concrete landscapes shape and mould us in an adverse way, and for the health and wellbeing of our cities, we need to replace the grey concrete slaps with moss, lichen, ferns and trees. It is in these green places that we can find refuge from life’s turmoil.

During the course of this project I will explore my own journey in healing the split between self and environment, culture and nature. One of the ways in healing this split in our collective psyche is to bring “nature”, back to our doorsteps, to the very places were we live, through adopting simple practices such as down to earth organic gardening. It is only through cultivating a sense of place and nurturing a greater sensitivity to the earth community, that we can heal our alienation from our larger body, the living earth. There is no better place than our own gardens in which to embark on this journey toward a truly sustainable and spiritual life.

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transformation, calling forth a sense of magic and enchantment.

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I agree with Dianne Dreher that, “Gardening slows us down, puts us back in touch with our own natural rhythms, teaches us patience and perseverance.” (p.2) I know that the times when I neglected gardening, my pace of life would speed up, resulting in stress and tiredness. Gardening grounds me, and strengthens me both physically and psychologically and spiritually.

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“A garden also asks us to open our senses wide, take in the green arc of a plant or the subtle sweet fragrance of an herb, and be unusually present to the physical work.” (p.99) Thomas Moore. Monty Don, author of “The Sensuous Garden” says, “…we Most people in current western societies live their lives separate from and in denial of their dependence on the natural world. Val Plumwood suggests that, “…we have split both ourselves and the world into hyperseparated realms of nature and culture and have acted as if only the last were genuinely human and truly important”.(p.139) Such thinking contributes to a dysfunctional relationship with oneself, each other and the world. In order to restore ecological sanity we need to heal this “hyper-separation”.

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This is the case particularly in cities, where asphalt and concrete make up a large part of the landscape. Most of our bushlands and wetlands in the Perth metropolitan area have been lost to urban development for housing and roads, driven by an obsession with technology and progress. These concrete landscapes shape and mould us in an adverse way, and for our health and wellbeing, we need to bring nature back into the town and cities, replacing the grey concrete slabs with moss, lichen, ferns and trees. It is in these green places that we can find refuge from life’s turmoil.

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During my research for this project and beyond, I will explore more deeply my journey in healing the split between culture and nature in myself. One of the ways is to bring “wilderness”, back to our doorsteps, to the very places were we live, by creating habitat for wild life, and through adopting simple practices such as down to earth organic gardening. It is only through cultivating a sense of place and nurturing a greater sensitivity to the earth community, that we can heal our alienation from our larger body, the living earth. There is no better place than our own gardens in which to embark on this journey toward a truly sustainable and spiritual life.

2 Why did you take on this project? 370

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What inspired me to take on this project is a passion and love for earth and a desire to share my experiences and knowledge about the healing benefits of gardening. Many people who visit this garden, which my partner and myself share with lots of non-human beings, instantly fall in love with it and would like to have their own sacred place, but do not know where to begin to create such a sanctuary for the nourishment of the soul. I have always gardened in solitude and silence, so to share this practice with others would be a new experience for me, which I believe would be very growth promoting.

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I have been enjoying the pleasures of organic gardening for more than 30 years, largely for the purpose of growing unsprayed, fresh food. Then about 13 years ago I discovered the “Work that Reconnects”, developed by Joanna Macy, which has led me to think and feel more deeply about my own sense of separation and alienation from myself and from the earth.

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My journey into wholeness further deepened during the past seven years as a result of a long and serious illness. It was during that time that I discovered gardening as a spiritual practice. Being in touch with the elements and tending to all the beings, who dwell in this place, has helped me to find more peace, as well as greater emotional and physical wellbeing through a deep emersion in the sensuous world around me; a kind of re-earthing. Digging, planting, harvesting and making compost are for me deeply sacred activities, affirming my connection to earth.

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As I was too ill to go anywhere or do much I found myself resting for some of the time in my backyard. It is there that I understood at cellular level that my body refused to be abused any longer by a lifestyle dictated by a consumerist industrial growth society. It is here among the trees and flowers that I found a way to come home to my own rhythms and to the rhythms of the earth and seasons, and the phases of the moon. The more I rested, and the more I let go, the more I healed.

3 What did you hope to learn? 72

I embarked on this project to deepen and expand the art of gardening with sustainability and spirituality in mind. I hoped to make this a journey in further exploring a way of healing my illusion of the separation from the natural world, through the practice of soulful gardening.

As I researched further into the topic, I became convinced that gardening could act as a powerful healing through reconnecting with nature, especially within the city walls. Additionally to the practices of the “Work that Reconnects”, gardening as a sustainable as well as spiritual practice helps me to further heal this sense of separation. I was also totally open to learn about things completely unknown and new to me. I was open to surprises.

4 What understanding of sustainability is reflected in the project? 681

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The overwhelming majority of city dwellers live totally unsustainable lifestyles, which are dependent on complex systems. We turn on the tap for water, turn on the switch for electricity and push our trolleys through the aisles in the supermarket for food. Such a lifestyle has desperately alienated us from nature. Most city people today would be hard pressed to correctly identify and name just a few local birds, insects or native plants. Lack of such basic knowledge is a sign of deep impoverishment of our understanding of the local natural world. Not only has our connection to each other disintegrated, but our relationships with the more than human world has collapsed also. Birds, frogs, dragonflies, lizards, possums, and trees in our neighbourhoods are no longer kin, and part of our community from whom we draw strength and affirm our sense of belonging.

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Our species is an integral part of a nesting of living systems, without which we cannot survive. Living in a “high- tech, high –speed” city depletes and degrades the human soul and often leads to physical, mental and emotional illness. To escape burnout many people go to the country for the weekend to” recharge their batteries”, only to return to repeat the process, a practice that is unsustainable. Ill health, stress, loneliness and isolation, depression and violence are all classical symptoms of a dysfunctional and ailing society. “No society has ever established socially and environmentally sound relationships without having strong bonds to the natural world.” (p.228)Michael Cohen . The western psyche suffers from an acute poverty of spirit. We are starved for the wild.

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Eco-therapist Howard Clinebell believes that we need to reconnect to wilderness for our health and wellbeing. He says that, “Like all repressed memories, repressed wilderness continues to haunt our ‘civilized’ lives.”(p.30) He suggests that by befriending “this wild side of our mind-body-spirit…can also help to encourage us to be more intentionally nurtured by nature and of its expressions from unspoiled wilderness to the more domesticated setting of a loved houseplant, a tree or garden or a favorite pet.”(p.30)

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Our disconnectedness from the wild, as well as from our inner wild nature goes hand in hand with the disappearance of the wild places around us. “It’s not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild natures fades”.(p.3) Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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We need to preserve those places, which are still wild, but we need to also bring the wild back into the cities. There is not better place to do this than in our own backyards. It is here that I am working on transforming my own world-view about the nature/culture split within my own psyche. It is here in my soil garden and my soul garden that I work to nourish my own inner greening, as well as the greening of the ground I stand on, through activities which nourishes me spiritually and encourages me to practice sustainability in every aspect of my life.

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Such practices are expressed through tending to the soil. At its core is the art of making compost in order to enrich the soil, so it may feed the myriad beings, living under the ground, who in turn feed the soil, creating a never ending cycle of food for all beings in the web of life.

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Not only is gardening sustaining for my spirit, but the wonderful foods we eat are grown under conditions which promote sustainability, through making compost, using organic fertilisers, mulching the ground to conserve water use and collection of seeds for the next crop.

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An equality important part of caring for this place is creating homes for the birds by planting local indigenous trees and shrubs. Placing wildlife nesting boxes into these trees, building ponds for the frogs and dragonflies, which gives us the feeling of living in the middle of a wetland. Our garden also is home to many orphaned rocks and logs rescued from desecrated bushlands destined for yet another housing development. It is through such earth- lovingness, that we can all mend and heal the places we inhabit.

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We have established many frog ponds surrounded by wetlands, creating the feeling of living in the middle of a swamp. I agree with Clarissa Pincola Estes, who suggests that, “We are all filled with a longing for the wild”.(p.xiii) Many people who visit our garden are surprised that we were able to create a garden which feels wild and untamed so close to the centre of the city, as if nature/wilderness can only exist somewhere far away from the city. It seems that we have resigned ourselves in believing that cities could not drip with green, wild sensuous beauty.

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Maybe the concrete places we create, are a reflection of the concrete landscapes within our collective psyche? Moving to the country to escape these grey places perpetuates the problem because we cannot escape our inner landscapes, as we will merely replicate them wherever we go. I have come to believe that the only way out is inward, that is exploring and healing our own alienation from the natural world, inherited from a culture which reduces nature to a mere resource to be plundered. We need to encourage the growth of green shoots everywhere- in our heart, mind and spirit, so we can change our story from a toxic one to a sustainable one for the healing of our ailing world.

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I have come to learn over the years and especially during this unit that healing one’s alienation from earth is a process, which has its own pace and momentum, and therefore requires, commitment, patience and great care. I believe that gardening is the perfect practice and metaphor for transforming relationship with ourselves, each other and nature, in finding more sustainable ways of living, and accessing deeper knowings and expressions of a more spiritual life, one that is grounded in earth.

5 What understanding of spirituality is reflected in the project? 231

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Thomas Moore says, that “Entering a garden is like passing through a mystical gate.” (p.97) He further suggests, “that the garden is a proper place of the soul, where concerns of the soul for beauty, contemplation, quiet, and observance take complete precedence over the busier concerns of daily life.” (p.97) I have always felt this deep peace of the soul when gardening, but never before have I so consciously and mindfully gardened to cultivate my inner soul garden. It feels as if the garden and me have entered into a deep relationship of mutual growth and need to be open to the full range of sensory perception”. (p.8) “The closest that we can get to any garden is only skin deep. Of all the senses, touch understands least, knows most”. (p.11) He believes that like our muscles, we can train and exercise our senses to a point of being “supernatural”. Joanna Macy offers many processes to experience the fullness of our senses, such as the “Mirror Walk” (p.88), which allows us to have a sensory experience of the world with our eyes closed. To set time aside on a daily basis in totally surrendering to all ones senses – the different shades of colours, the multitudes of scents, shades of light, tastes in bitter, sweet, pungent, and sensations of rough bark and the silkiness of rose petals, is like making time for prayer. Such emersion experiences are deeply earth- centring, therefore profoundly spiritual.

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Since embarking on this journey my senses have hightened and sharpened to the world around me. “Being” and “doing” amongst the frogs and the waterlilies induces contentment and nourishment for my soul. There is such an enrichment of both soul and soil, when the practice of inner and outer gardening intertwines as one practice. Gardeners like Elizabeth Murray uses the four seasons as metaphors for our inner seasons, winter being the darkness of the soul, “a time of purification, cleansing, making space for the new to arise.” (p.10) Spring as the season of new growth and regeneration giving way to summer, which offers the full splendour of colour and perfumes, a time to expand the soul’s growth. Autumn rewards us with the fruits of our labour, the gifts of the inner and outer work, a time of thanksgiving. It is also “the time for letting go, as once again there will be dormancy.” (p.133)

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In the Jewish spiritual tradition for instance winter is not a time for dormancy, but rather a time for growth. Rabbi Shefa explains that,

“During this dark and cold time of year we can find within us a fertile garden. Here we can consciously grow the qualities that will best serve us in realizing our true Divine essence. In the Jewish Tradition these qualities are called "midot." The Jewish path is all about cultivating, through intention and practice, qualities like compassion, courage, openness, loving-kindness, honesty, surrender, strength, humility or patience….” From “Gardening in the Soil of the Heart: at Interweave” with Rabbi Shefa Gold, December 15, 2002

http://www.rabbishefagold.com/Gardening.html

6 What did you learn about this theme, issue or study?

Making the art of Soulful Gardening my project has led me to research

7 Important issues and questions encountered along the way 593

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A very important issue is that of the seasons. I love the metaphor of the four seasons and yet it does not fit with the seasons of this place – Wadjuk country. The Nyungar people of this land honour and celebrate six seasons. This challenges me to explore ways of integrating the four seasons inherited from my ancestry from Europe with the six seasons of my new home. As a result I seriously questioned the sustainability of growing European vegetables during the dry season? Eating bush tucker would be more sustainable.

The more I pondered the term sustainability the more I became troubled. We use the term so loosely these days, with “Sustainable Development” being the popular catch-phrase. The Oxford dictionary defines the word “to sustain” as “carry weight of, hold up, keep from falling or sinking, esp. for prolonged period.”(p.1076)

Despite my confusions and question I still keep coming back to gardening, because our backyards and street verges are only meters away from our living spaces. As our urban places are becoming increasingly devoid of mature trees due to “infill” towards medium density housing, we need to find creative ways of bringing wilderness back into our suburbs. The whole concept of putting aside “Wilderness” devoid of humans, is a more recent construct (Thoreau and others). Aboriginal people lived their lives deeply embedded in the natural world, not separate from it. They actually looked after country, and tended to the land the way a gardener does. The landscape was shaped and changed by them through the practice of burning, which has evolved many trees and plants to depend on fire for germination.

During the past 200 years we too have changed and shaped the landscape in Australia, but unfortunately largely in a way which has degraded and depleted the soil and destroyed much of its wild life and habitat. Most of our rivers in Western Australia were clean and drinkable at the time of contact, and today except for two, they are all salty and polluted. Instead of living within our natural ecology, we have build a culture based on technology and have endeavoured to preserve some “Wilderness” faraway from out living places, because we cannot trust ourselves to live sustainably in these natural places. This issue has led me to think more about aboriginal practices of living with the land in a sustainable and spiritual way.

This project has inspired and encouraged me to integrate my love for the bushland, with that of my garden. I woke up this morning with a dream in which groups of people gathered to look after their local bushlands, creating wild life corridors in order to join together all the fragments of bushlands throughout the metropolitan area. My research for this project, especially revisiting Hepburn Heights, has led me to want to be involved with my local bushland preservation group to regenerate it and create a wildlife corridor through my street, toward the next storm water drain. This would connect my native garden in front of my house with the verges and nearby bushlands.

8 How did this research influence your plan or creation of the project? 208

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Gardening as a project presented itself to me right from the start, for I could not think of a project that could be more sustainable and spiritual. As I researched the Internet I found wonderful books on Inner Gardening, Sensuous Gardening, Zen Gardening and Soulful Gardening etc. These books were a wonderful resource, which guided and inspired me in deepening my gardening practice, which helped me to prepare the seed bed, in which to germinate and nurture a deeper understanding of such a rich and diverse topic. The title, “Wild Soulful Gardening: As a Sustainable and Spiritual Practice emerged from the readings as a logical choice.

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I was profoundly touched and consequently forever changed by Liana Christiansen’s lecture/workshop in Sustaining Stories. I never thought of stories of toxic or sustaining. I am aware that the many beings that make up our garden speak all the time, telling stories. The earthworms in the making of compost tell a story of death and renewal, by recycling the decaying to make food for new life. The frogs tell stories with their croaks, announcing tonight’s rain and possible spawn for a new generation. I too tell my stories about my love for all these beings and how to best serve them.

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We need all these sustaining stories for the healing of our confused minds. We need these sustaining stories to give our lives spiritual meaning, which grows out of the very soil on which we stand. We need sustaining stories to fill our sad hearts with hope for a sustainable future.

9 Where does this research and project take your learning for the future? 478

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Through this research for my project I have discovered a whole movement of community gardening in New York, which was started by a social worker located in a high crime area. She encouraged members of a street gang to participate in a tenant gardening contest. This project has grown over the years to more than seventy community gardens, which has brought the communities together, reduced the crime rate and greened and beautified urban slums.

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I would like to go the New York as part of furthering my learning about community gardening as a contribution towards “greening” our cities. Living a sustainable and spiritual life is our natural birthright. Over-use of technology, consumerism, over-population, and fostering individualism has contributed to the fragmentation of communities, which has left us spiritually impoverished.

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I feel inspired to continue with my garden project as a place for people to visit. I want my garden to be a healing well, a place to find renewal and deep peace. I want my gardens to also be a dreaming well, a place for visitors to find inspiration and passion to find their own garden/ earth healing projects. And most of all I want my garden to be a refuge and home for the myriad beings; the frogs, birds, lizards, lichen, moss, ant and possums.

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What I would like to offer people is the opportunity through visits to, and workshop in my garden to rediscover their connection to earth, through the practice of wild, soulful gardening in their own backyard or balcony. Within the simplicity of gardening we can discover so many other practices, such as voluntary simplicity, recycling, building community with fellow humans and the more than human world and finding a more peaceful, slower pace of life toward a holing and healing relationship with all life. I strongly believe that a more holistic lifestyle is possible in the city and desirable for a truly sustainable future. “Each time we learn how to join together and mend our ties with our own little place called home, we link our souls with the soils that sustain us, and nurture the network that is healing the Earth.”(239) Elan Shapiro -Ecopsycology.

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Through my daily practice in gardening over the last 3 months I have come to know that while deeply emersed in nurturing and tending to the plants and animals in my garden, that there is no separation between culture and nature, self and nature. Gardening brings all the fragments together. Thomas Moore puts it succinctly when he says that:

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“The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes.”(p99) Thomas Moore

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It is here amongst the stone paths and the patches of moss that I feel the wild and whole woman that I am. It is here that I passionately share my love for the frogs, lizards, magpies, bottlebrushes and pansies with my fellow humans towards a more sustainable, spiritual and peaceful world.

We cannot live on culture alone, we need nature also, precisely because we are inseparable and an integral part of nature.

It is the spiritual aspect of this project that has captured most of my attention.

Henryk Skolimowski reminds us that, “How we treat nature is ultimately a religious matter.” (p.115)

This practice of “Re-earthing”, nourishes me spiritually, and has a sustainable outcome of providing our household with healthy, organically grown food.

Without watering my garden it cannot sustain itself by itself in growing non-indigenous plants in this climate. Does that make gardening unsustainable during the dry season? Yes! But then buying our food from the supermarket is even more unsustainable and grown further away from our dinner table, making it very unsustainable. On the other hand agrarian civilisation have brought water to the dry fields during the dry season. Using bore-water would be sustainable so long as the underground water keeps replenishing during every rainy season.

As a result of Liana’s lecture/workshop/ritual I questioned as to whether this project is the best way to express the current journey I have undertaken for this unit in deepening my own spiritual connection with the land in a sustainable way and sharing that knowledge with others. I needed to return to Hepburn Heights, a tuart/banksia woodland in the northern suburb, which I helped protect from housing development. I have a strong spiritual connection to that place. I spend several days during that week there, recording my story about the place and the struggle for its survival, a place that I think is deeply spiritual as well as sustainable.