It took over 3 years of steady sculpting – removing brambles &weeds, sculpting drainage swales, carving rock-wall terraces, and planting shrubs & flowers, and yet eventually the homestead yards & gardens of my most recent pilgrimage’s primary patron were indeed finally transformed into an oasis of Beauty & Peace …

“A properly tended landscape should make one feel as if he or she has entered a sacred space — a place not just set apart but reverberant in its divinity. And it seems to me that, to achieve this noble end, the gardener &/or land-sculptor must add some kind of additional flow to the existing landscape, must feel the way that land wants to grow and then turn its present prose into something nearer its desired poetry … Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an obviously adored gardenscape, an overwhelming impression can make the visitor feel that he or she, as an individual human being, is slowly being unraveled and melted into his or her nearby. The surrounding space becomes so vibrant and so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult for the attendee to keep a balanced grip on his or her own individual being. The mind swells out to fill the entire surroundings, becoming so diffuse in the process that he or she loses the ability to keep the same in any way fastened to the physical. The movement of sun or stars becomes the only perceptible change in what is felt & seen. And in those celestial travelings, the visitor feels something he or she can hardly know to name: some huge, cosmic interconnection that only be properly monikered as Love.” ~ inspired by Michael Pollan & Haruki Murakami

Filed under: My Life in Pictures by Scaughdt