Garden.

Asset credits (Adobe Stock): “Healthy lifestyle. Seamless background. Vector illustration” By UA Creative; “Stylized Grocery Bag Illustration” By Minty; “Figs and pieces, fig flowers and seeds. doodle lettering fig…” By Angelina Bambina; “Minimalist Abstract Vegetables Illustration” By Minty; “Raw vegetables, cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, beets on a dark gray background…” By Vetriya; “Silver metallic stars sparkle” By Wavebreak Media; “Red Rose” By Nikita; Put together by me, LeAnn D. Jenkins

Lately, I’ve been dreaming. Actually, I’m always dreaming. Lately, I’ve felt a pull not only to dream, but to create those things that I’m dreaming of. To take my dreams more seriously.

And, what has followed is… anxiety. Fear. The border between fantasy and manifestation is a risky one. Cost seems inevitable. Failure is always possible. And with both of those comes the possibility of the loss of the dream entirely. This can cause my mind to go into a hyperactive, fear-based place that literally makes my heart palpitate and stresses the systems of my body.

At the end of November I was filling out a weekly review for my therapy session and I wrote, “The last couple days when my mind keeps [ruminating] and trying to figure things out, I’ve been saying to myself, ‘My mind is not a tyrant. My mind is a garden.’ A weird phrase, but it helps because then I start to imagine a garden, which brings in more peace.”

That sentence has continued to come up for me since then. And it has branched into new phrases, each time expanding and deepening its implications:

First,

My mind is not a tyrant. It’s a garden.

Then,

Not a tyrant. A garden.

Then,

Mind not a tyrant. Garden.

When meditating on the first phrase - My mind is not a tyrant. It’s a garden. - I would follow the scene that unfolded, until it brought me to a place of internal peace.

The second phrase - Not a tyrant. A garden. - applied the dichotomy between tyrant and garden to something beyond me. It highlighted a human conundrum. A fixation of the zeitgeist. Hopes, dreams, things we want to keep from dissolving, things we want to manifest can call in an authoritarian attempt to violently grasp control to the detriment of the body (the person or the people). A tyrant. There is always another option - not from the top down, but from the ground. Of many things growing out of common soil. Definitely dirty and grimy, but a work of patience, peace, and collaboration with the Spirit of Life. A garden.

The third phrase is a command. Mind not a tyrant. Garden. The “mind not” does not mean don’t be aware of it. The tyrant needs to be watched. It needs remediation. It needs medicine. And we need protection from its violence - a small legion on guard like in Nehemiah. But that is the peripheral, not the center. Focus on the tyrant seizes my body and closes it up in fear. But when my body imagines and then engages in the act of growing the seeds of what we need and long to partake in, it brings me into a place of watching what is happening on the ground, of using wisdom and knowledge as protection, of maintaining the openness needed to receive the nourishment in the ecosystem.

When the garden we are growing is the focus, even the presence of the tyrant can strengthen our efforts, our resolve, our foresight, our ingenuity. We exchange resources and stave off destruction so that seeds of change can grow. Against drought and predators and disease, we watch and problem-solve, and pray. We work with the drive of that, which says “I/we want to live!” And we want to live abundantly.

When my mind is trying to grasp for control out of fear and insecurity, it stresses my body out in ways that leave imprints of pain and call death closer. When my mind is in garden-mode, it gives the peace and courage to create abundance in a way that allows my efforts to work with the messiness of life around me, and in a way that will outlive this body.

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Feel free to use the image above or its words as a meditation.

Garden.