11 Centers in your own garden, created by your desire

In your own garden, too, the fundamental process has an enormous role, and true unfolding is possible, as it emerges from the combination of your feeling for the land, and your egoless imagination.
A garden with real life comes from thinking in living terms about every plant, every path, every bush, the fertilizer, the water, every little wall. To get this right (of course, this is like everything else), it has to be made gradually, each bit adapted to the others, each plant given the place and sunshine, shade that it likes best; each bit of grass protected; any trickle of running water, if it occurs, helping plants to grow.
This is something which nearly everyone can have a hand in. At one time or another in our lives, most of us do some kind of work in a garden. Gardens are therefore the easiest part of the world to influence; the most accessible of the parts of the world where unfolding with true life can be made to occur — really, by almost anyone.

The most wonderful thing about your garden is that you can do almost anything you want there. In my picture of the world, these gardens, thousands of them, reflect not only the beauty of nature, flowers, vegetables, trees. They reflect, too, our own heart’s desire, a place where we may see the individuality and love of different people expressed in the most ordinary way, a million-fold. It is the least constrained part of our environment, the place where each of us it most free to do what we want. So we can express ourselves; we can have our heart’s desire; we really can do what we want to do.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/7 The Character of Gardens#