A lush serenade to the patience and fortitude of living with uncertainty and letting life unfold on its own terms.
By Maria Popova
“I work like a gardener,” the visionary artist Joan Miró observed in reflecting on his creative process. It was in a garden bed that Virginia Woolf arrived at her exquisite epiphany about what it takes to be an artist. For poet Ross Gay, time spent in the garden is “an exercise in supreme attentiveness.” Looking back on his life, the great neurologist Oliver Sacks recognized the healing power of gardens as one of only two non-medical interventions that have helped his patients, alongside music. “It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness,” the bryologist and Native American storyteller Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in her gorgeous ode to gardening.
I too have healed, have honed my attention, have fine-tuned my artistic voice and purpose, have learned and practiced happiness in the garden, on my tiny patch of Brooklyn soil. I too have knelt on the frost-bitten ground to press into it the first seed of spring, have craned my neck by midsummer to meet the prayerful face of the sunflower, radiant and rueful in its solitary stature. I too have plunged my hands into the moist dirt, cupping the infant root system of a willow tree I know will outlive me, cupping with it the bewildering, consecrating knowledge that seed and sunflower and willow and I all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, no larger than the dot levitating over the small i, the I lowered from the pedestal of ego, all the while remembering that humility comes from humilis — Latin for low, of the earth.
That — how gardening brings us into intimate contact with the rhythms and relational marvels of nature, with ourselves as humble notes in the rhythm and nodes in the marvel — is what artist Debbie Millman, my longtime former partner and now darling friend, explores in this wondrous illustrated love letter to the garden she started with her then-fiancé, now-wife Roxane Gay, part of a four-part series for TED, narrated in Debbie’s own lush and recognizable voice.
Complement with this illustrated Victorian encyclopedia of poetic lessons from the garden and a lovely contemporary children’s book about how gardening teaches us to work with unselfish purpose, then savor more of Debbie’s splendid visual stories and meditations on her Instagram.