More than a week after the Spring Equinox now, and the clocks have changed to BST, giving that wonderful extra evening light. I feel my being stretching out into a new sense of growth, warmth, light… an unfurling from what has seemed to be a prolonged period of winter, of greyness, and of being tightly bundled up against the cold and damp. Or perhaps against living in this world which can often seem so challenging to inhabit. Our current global problems are not going to change with the light, or the season, but this time of year is often the best for implementing personal changes… and the personal is where each of us must start first. And I can only start with me.
So, another phase, another move - this time in deepest darkest winter (note to self: not ever again!) to Harrogate and a 10mins-in-the-car proximity to the lovely RHS Harlow Carr Gardens. Although once again in a flat without a personal garden (albeit a communal one for the block), I am enjoying ‘owning’ the space at Harlow Carr as my new nemeton.
I’ve had several trips there now: a few short reccy ones in cold or rainy weather which ended up being more explorations of the deliciousness on offer in Betty’s Cafe (famous throughout Yorkshire, if not beyond) and in the splendid RHS gift shop where blindfolded I could have picked almost any book or piece of houseware and been happy to own it. But I’ve also had two ‘proper’, longer walks, taking me around the 60 or so acres and spending time sitting, being, and reflecting as well as wandering, looking, and getting to know what’s growing there.
As I wandered, I mused on the past joys of my life when I have been active in a garden in one way or another. I spoke briefly with a young woman digging - with a spade of course, not a mechanical digger - a large bed where, she told me, seasonal vegetables would be planted out. I love it that in this garden (as with all RHS gardens) gardening as food production is as important as gardening for plant preservation, for wildlife, for beauty, and for all the other reasons we might tend our gardens.
I muse too on gardens as nemeta: gardens as sacred, protected, quiet, reflective spaces. They can be - and thankfully are - deliberately set up as that in many places, or, as at Harlow Carr, a set aside part of a larger garden called a ‘peace garden’; ‘garden for reflection’, or simply labelled ‘quiet area’ or something similar.
But a recent visit was on one of the Easter Bank Holiday days, and the place was very lively with multiple families and coach trips as well as plenty of general dogsbodies - though thankfully no dogs. (I’m not anti-dog, by the way, more anti certain irresponsible dog owners. In any case, a formal visitor garden is not the best place for a dog to run around having fun. Which in my experience, is what many dogs like to do.)
But this busy Bank Holiday did make me reflect on whether a formal visitor garden is indeed the best place, on such a day, for an individual like me seeking some inner peace and wellbeing. I very soon became irritated by hordes of children (ditto dog comment of previous paragraph); by people having loudspeaker-enhanced phone conversations - even shouting to their friend or family member across a large area of garden; by people walking across roped-off areas - even standing in beds to take photographs; by people eating food and dropping the wrappers (I did kindly return the wrapper); and, to be honest, by people full stop. By people being people.
So… what to do? Easy to utilise the shoulds/must/oughts - or this case, the shouldn’t. People shouldn’t be dropping litter or being unnecessarily noisy or letting their children trample new plants, but given they are, and given that people will be people and I have only a minimum level of agency in relation to others (returning a piece of dropped litter, for example), then I must find my inner peace somehow, somewhere.
So, leaving and finding it elsewhere is an option, but if choosing to stay rather than leave, then it becomes even more pertinent to engage the senses. Focusing on the senses - visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory - is always important when taking time for oneself; when doing any kind of inner work or during times of reflection or meditation. In this case, however, when troubled by what we can see and hear, we need to major on what we can smell and taste, and what we can feel.
Feel in the tactile sense: the touch of a breeze on skin, or warmth from the sun; the textures of bark,
leaves, petals, even the earth itself; feel how your body is moving through space; feel how your feet touch and lift from the ground… especially in such a place where the ground is protected and worked by those who care for it.
Feeling in the emotional sense too. I put the grumpy anti-social feelings to one side for now and concentrate on the positives: knowing I’m getting some fresh air and exercise, enjoying the better parts of the visual and the auditory (flower colours, trees coming into leaf, birdsong, water sounds…)
Then there’s smell and taste. How much have we ‘civilised’ folk distanced ourselves from the pleasures of smell? Or don’t ever think to stop a moment, flare our nostrils as we breathe in deeply, or bend down to smell a flower, or rub a leaf between our fingers and inhale the fragrance. I’m amazed how I hardly ever - even in a public park or garden - see people smelling anything, and how often people smile or chuckle when they see me stretching up to smell some just-out-of-reach blossom, or kneeling on the ground for low-lying flowers like bluebells and cowslips.
And taste... taste as an actual eating experience: nothing so wonderful as popping a sun-ripened early autumn blackberry into your mouth, or nibbling some wild garlic as you wander through a woodland in spring. But if it’s a step too far for you to eat something you’ve not bought in a supermarket, then at least open your mouth wide, put out your tongue and consciously savour the air. Maybe not where it’s traffic-busy though.
Focusing consciously on our different senses is one readily available and completely free approach to improving our wellbeing… an approach I use all the time for myself; when working therapeutically with others; and in my wider Nemetona Project work. I’d love to know how it is for you when you try it…
