Jewelweed & the secret heart garden
“JEWELWEEDS Two species, also known as touch-me-nots, grow in the East and 4 in the far West. They like moist soil and shady places and grow 1 to 5 feet high. The orange- or yellow-spurred flowers droop from slender branchlets. The ripe seed pods explode when touched, scattering their seeds, which are eaten by several kinds of birds. The nectar of the flower is a favorite of hummingbirds, and the sap is reputed to be a treatment for poison ivy. — Summer and early fall. Touch-me-not family.”
~ FLOWERS by Dr. Herbert Zim and Dr. Alexander Martin
And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles.
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
The Secret Garden was my favorite book growing up. I remember reading it for the first time in the car as we drove through the Appalachian mountains over spring break, the earth rolling in green waves outside the window. It’s one of those books you remember exactly where you were and who you were when it first touched you.
I loved the idea that there could be a place outside of our reality where beauty, mystery, and magic could exist. I think I’ve been searching for that place since then. Maybe I could find it by moving to new cities or searching miles of forest land on unmarked trails. Maybe I could make it by growing my own garden.
What I didn’t realize is that the secret garden isn’t just a physical place. It can also exists in our heart space.
Your heart space is a place of pure love and acceptance within you where healing for yourself and others takes place. Holding heart space in your life happens through nurturing love in what you choose to witness, listen to and become, and happens when you are aligned with your values.
~ Avalon Malibu
This secret heart garden we tend can be carried with us wherever we live, whatever we have time to grow. This is comforting to me as this first year with a baby has me questioning how much time I’ll actually be able to devote to the garden. Maybe there’s another space I can cultivate beauty and magic, separate from the outside world, the gates opening for only me.
The key to the heart space garden is hidden in many things. It appears in that moment when you are suddenly shaken out of the daily routine stupor and into presence, a shock to the senses. This jolt of awareness makes room for love to fill the bones and spark the nerve endings. Those moments of awe, inspiration, tenderness, vulnerability, curiosity all give us glimpses into our secret garden.
One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun--which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone's eyes.
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett, Secret Garden
If we choose to walk through the gates, to meet presence with intention, we are given the ability to rest in sanctuary anywhere, at any time. It’s a kind of compartmentalization where we are free to pursue all of the things we love, that bring us joy, with no influence from the outside world.
Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
We don’t have to wait for these moments of awe to unlock the gates either. We can create them ourselves on a daily basis with ritual practice. A daily devotion can become a key. Making art, reading about new topics, playing with a baby, coming into community, walking in the woods, all give us the opportunity to enter this heart space garden.
Once inside, we can plant and fertilize new ideas, explore all of the nooks and crannies the rest of the world can’t see, commune with Spirit. We can let things proliferate, grow wild over the paths, reaching toward the sky with abandon. We can harvest its fruits and its flowers, carrying them out of the garden and into “real” world as a gift to others if we choose, or keep them for our own stores.
All you need is a little space to let things germinate. As you may be getting ready to plant your own garden this year, don’t forget about the fertile soil within as well. What cracks you open? What do you feel guilty indulging in? What are the pieces of yourself you haven’t shown to anyone else? What about you feels at odds with the “real” world? Where is the tension?
These are all doorways to the secret heart garden. This is where we begin digging.
Much love,
Val
P.S. Feel free to share, it’s much appreciated!
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Lovely Val 💞 I have always loved jewelweed and feel thankful it got the beautiful name it deserves!!
Hi Val, as always I loved this newsletter and your woodcuts are amazing. Something I will definitely try in the future. Right now, nature journaling and water colors! I'm hoping to find someone local here in MI that teaches woodcuts.