More from Iron John, by Robert Bly.
“If a man or woman has been sexually abused in childhood, or has lived in any form of a ‘dysfunctional family,’ he or she will need sooner or later a ‘heaven haven.’ The story says that each of us needs it.
The walled garden is a shelter from the world, and a place to recover your broken trust…..A walled garden also is a place to develop introversion.”
Rilke says:
I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough
to make every moment holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with
my will,
as it goes towards action,
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
“We could say that in the walled garden, as in the alchemical vessel, new metals get formed and the old ones melt. The lead of depression melts and becomes grief. The drive of success, an insistence tin, joins with Aphrodite’s copper, and makes bronze, which is good to make shields and images of gods. The enclosed garden then suggests cultivation as opposed to rawness, boundaries as opposed to unbounded sociability, soul concerns as growth for the soul desire opposed to obsession with a generalized greed for things……
In the garden the soul and nature marry. When we love cultivation more than excitement we are ready to start a garden. In the garden we cultivate yearning and longing – those strangely un-American feelings – and notice tiny desires. Paying attention to tiny hardly noticeable feelings is the garden way. That’s the way lovers behave.
The enclosed garden is a right place for lovers…..
Garden work may begin unexpectedly. An illness that confines the sufferer to a room for weeks may be his enclosed garden. An accident may bring it on. Thoreau, on the other hand, chose to live for some months in a cabin he built himself, and he and his cabin and Walden Pond were his garden. He knew very well that he had become a lover, and said, “A match has been found for me at last: I have fallen in love with a shrub oak.”
Some men entering the garden begin by getting up at 5am, and keeping an hour for themselves each morning before work. A father, in order to do that, may have to resist his own insistence that life belongs to his work, his children and his marriage.
Making a garden, and living in it, means attention to boundaries, and sometimes we need the boundaries to prevent caretaking from coming in and occupying our time.
I am too tiny in this world and not tiny enough
Just to lie before you and be a thing.
Addiction to perfecting, as Mariann Woodman reminds us, amounts to having no garden. The anxiety to be perfect withers the vegetation. Shame keeps us from cultivating the garden. Men and women deeply caught in shame will, when they tend their garden, pull out both weeds and flowers because so many of their own feelings seem defective and soiled.
What do we love so much that we want to protect it from strangers? That is a good question for garden makers.
No matter how deeply I go down into myself
My God is dark, and like a webbing made
Of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I love the analogy of being in a walled garden.
I love that when we seek to know ourselves we have to put up a wall and cultivate ourselves.
I truly lived in a walled garden and mended my wounds, my sorrows and tears fell there and helped grow a new me.
To put up boundaries and to lean into yourself, going deeply into the dark places to find answers and then to sit with those answers awhile.
In your own world you will find ways to have garden time.
I was blessed to be at home, alone.
My house was my garden and it expanded to the road along the river. It became my sanctuary, my walled garden.
I M Perfect lady 