Out west II: a garden for the heart

Events conspire.  There may be people obtuse enough to believe that it is their own impulses,  motivations, or plans (God help them) that direct their lives, but I know of few of them.

We plod along from day to day, our minds on the duties and ordinary pleasure or pain of living, but, then, some force greater than our minds will hold comes to rescue, and pulls us back into the universal design.

So appeared one of those moments.  But the steps leading to it began long before...in fact, in Part I of this blog with Frederick Law Olmstead.  And who knows?  Perhaps before that, while I was not paying attention.  That photo of the gazebo above, for example, was just a photo I copied to give me an idea for my patio which, in fact, bears no resemblance at all to the culture, largesse, or shade of this one.  But an idea, however small.  And the one below, which I had taken months earlier, of a fence I thought to build along the back border.

Neither have yet been executed.  Things come in their own time for me.

Anyway, along came Olmstead last week at the Arboretum in Asheville to bring universe and consciousness together.  Philosophy comes first:  the garden as freedom...freedom particularly (and this didn't occur to me until this morning) of the mind.

Our third day out with Jim last week took us to Brevard, a town I usually like to visit for its thrift stores, especially the hospice and the women's shelter shops.  My first visit years ago to the latter brought me instant luck...face to face with the one thing I'd been searching, a wide copper tray ($15) to use as a birdbath.  There it is, in place.

This time, though no Brevard thrifting, we walked the streets to give Mary Ellen a look at the town.  

As we wandered, I found Number 7 Arts, a co-op of local artists, some of whose work I was taken with.  A woodworker, Jim Brandon; a collagist, Marcia Brennan; Nancy Richards, an artist who paints in alcohol ink on barely opaque paper; and Carol Clay, an acrylic painter on helpful duty.  Ordinary art-interest visits, sure.  Still.

collage, Marcia Brennan (by permission)

What, you ask now (as I did, at first), has this to do with Olmstead and garden designs?  It is, after all, a marker on the trail...subtle, appealing enough to stop and consider for its own sake.  Likewise our lunch stop, the Quotations Cafe, the wall of which gave me another pause.

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?  

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

On our long way out of town, we stopped at Mud Dawbers, a pottery studio where I found outside on the shelves of "mistakes" a lovely ocean-on-a-churning-day blue cup.

Inside, the potter who had made it, Kathleen Hannigan, became helpful identifying the who's-whos, oddly difficult otherwise, among their makers, for their work is displayed by color and sometimes form rather than name...as if, I thought then, art came before the artist. 

With its kiln and workspaces, alone on the road for some miles, these potters made art...daily-useful art, most often...from the thick, rudimentary element of earth...clay.  How near and far to and from the ground, I thought, artists need to be to work among us.  And maybe how near and far from our ground are we, artists or not.  Is there a space, not only of ground, but of mind or spirit where art lives and works among nature and us, a space that invents as it grows?

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Home from the west, the other night we took a walk around our circle, where ahead of us Artie Dixon was walking her tiny Zoe.  We stopped to talk.  She and Dail were disappointed at not getting in to a sold-out documentary that night; there was one more showing the next afternoon at the Chelsea Theatre...maybe I'd like to go with her?

photo from Floating Stone Productions

The subject, "The Uncommon Garden", by Chapel Hill filmmaker Olympia Stone (www.floatingstone.com) about the artistry behind Dan Krebill's home, appealed to me...it seemed one more stone on a path now appearing to lead somewhere.  Why not?

Why tempt fate? nudged the universe.

We went, we saw. I sat mesmerized...not simply at the fantasy of garden Krebill had had built, one he could wheel himself through to bring art and nature into an alignment hardly conceived by anyone except the crew of artisans and designers he gathered to the task, but by the evolving collation of all those other gardens and pieces of gardens, freeing mind (and body, too), along this way of mine.

photo from Southern Documentary Fund

As the film recorded his story (he was in the theatre audience that afternoon, a genial, charming man), the narrative to his garden became clear:  from his life in the military, to his children, to his bizarre accident that stunted life, and beyond to the continuing of his life...for his life did continue, yes, if not in the way previously supposed.  

photo from Rotary Botanical Gardens

On the screen he and the camera rolled around the peculiar, very particularly chosen icons...not the usual garden of plants and small implements, but creations of light, air, metal, stone, glass...even a dragon with fire!  Plants lived both green and iconic.

Every scene dug deeper into the reason I was there.  A painful reason, a breathtaking one, a hopeful one, a path beginning in its ending.   I knew, then, what the point of all this was.  

I needed a garden with heart.

It so happens that a few weeks ago, my sister's search for a house of her own here was increasingly frustrating her, and I had offered to build her an apartment on the back of my house.  She looked at me warily, acknowledging the awkardness, not sure what I was about...would she even want an apartment here? how would that work?...but I plowed ahead trying to see how it could be done.

As The Uncommon Garden neared its end, that project swept itself off the table and broke into the ash of sheer distraction. (My sister looked relieved.) I felt torn away by this wave, very much like tumbling in an ocean swell that suddenly overtakes you.

My child, I thought, my child whose life did not go on after.  Where is the place that child lives?  And where....for I did not, either, ever make space for the treachery so deep-rooted, so entrenched, that I have swum for years above it, carrying on, with no space for freedom of memory and heart?

I could hardly breathe for the shock of it.  But all through the second film shown, a longer one, which would have on any other day been of great interest to me, I kept pulling out my notebook and scribbling what Krebill's life's garden grew in me...what to make of all this?  what do I make of this?  

Sea-change, I wrote, and scribbled on.

The awkwardly shaped space of yard behind my house is a difficult landscape where new trees die, paths grow over, and plantings have so far come to nothing.  Beneath the surface, clay, root, and stone clog its heart; the surface itself is cluttered with the sort of climbing weeds the mind collects, unkempt and unexplored, so long needing clarity.  

It took Joseph to see and build my front slope...a garden I tend as best I can, seeing to water, weeds (there aren't many) and new life.  It was work that he thought redemptive; his gift was so to me, as well.  We are both proud of it.

But this back piece...over the years,  I've neglected it, sometimes making jabs at potential, but in insignificant, fruitless, and unseen ways.  Now, despite all my failed attempts, this moment with Krebill's garden had created a vision for me.  Are not the elements of its life already there?  The hard nature that grounds a ground?

And all this time, have I not been collecting pieces to form it and live there? Here and there in the yard, they live separate.

Heart, 2000, rvm

For whom would this garden, I wrote, be more than grounding...be a space to open the missing heart? 

The second film shown, longer (Aldwynth, also by Olympia Stone), I watched, appreciated, learned from, but the sliver of mind it took to do so had little to do with the rest of my being as my pen inked ground, root, stone, arbor, art, icon, on the pages in the darkened theatre.  My chest hurt for hours after, the impulse so strong.

I paint, yes, making art a space to store pieces of life without words.  But only what on media I call my #smallart, really.  I write, have written all my legible life.  Words are my thinking.  I have a high degree in literature, poetry particularly, and taught such for 40 years.  All those "epiphanies" that writers claim to have, part of the curriculum of their fame...they seemed so abstract, so poetically an artifice.  

Now, I don't know what to call yesterday's culmination of experience (if indeed it has reached culmination...a garden is never finished).  "Epiphany" is the only word that comes to mind and yet it cannot hold enough of that sea-change of mind-body I can still feel now, two days later.

I wonder if I dare even write all this to you; it seems so precious, so deeply interior a need struggling to get out of darkness (there, I know, I am on the verge of bending to cliche').  But what other words are there for this certainty of silence and vision and hope offered me now in a garden?