Blog o’ Gnosis

A couple years ago, I wrote about how singing and especially songwriting was one of my personal indicator species—those activities which, by their presence in my daily routine, mean that I am functioning at my fullest. By their absence, I can measure the level of stress that I am under. When they return, it is like I have just noticed that the sun is out and am able to take a full, deep breath.

Now that I have my own place, it is dawning on me that perhaps there are other soul-health indicators that I have been unaware of all this time. I have never had a garden of my own, to design and plant and care for just the way I want. For the past couple years there has been too much going on to do more than punt in the garden here: plant a few things, see if the deer eat them, water them when I remember, and hope they survive.

I made a few good choices: an apple and fig tree which thrive in the coastal climate, a bay tree (laurel nobilis) which gently demarcates the front yard from the side yard and gives me pungent leaves for cooking. Somehow those got watered enough, and with deer netting around them they are growing well into their second year.

Other choices weren’t so wise, and I won’t bother to list them. But this year I was determined to get started on the project I have always wanted to create: an herb garden. Specifically, I wanted to grow the herbs that I use in my work with dreams: mugwort, valerian, skullcap, lavender, hops, verbena, angelica, rose, sage, rosemary, and a few others. I figured if I started small, with one or two plants of each, chances were that I could keep up with maintenance and harvesting, and eventually make dream pillows with homegrown herbs.

It turns out that even starting small is a lot of work! Finding good medicinal herb plants is not easy, for one thing. Then planting them in neglected beds meant that I had to attend to the woody stragglers planted in years previous that were barely hanging on. I kept at it, weeding and sheet mulching and hooking everything up to a drip. In some cases, that meant ripping out and re-creating an entire bed taken over by spearmint, or doing a morning’s excavation of the old drip system, parts of which were blocked and parts which were leaking like a sieve.

By early this month I had everything in the ground and hooked up to the drip. There are still a few mysteries, like what is eating my marigolds (deer and insect resistant!) to the ground, and what that strange color on one of the roses is. But there have also been wonderful finds, like a pitcher sage that survived three years with no care whatsoever, and two types of honeysuckle that hid from the deer and are bouncing right back to grow over a trellis.

In one bed there was a French lavender that I feared the worst for, but pruned back and watered anyway. I checked on it two weeks ago, and it was full and bushy and loaded with stalks of unripened flowers. So over the full moon this week I have been doing my first Summer Solstice harvest of lavender, as well as rosemary. My dining room table is piled high with fragrant herbs soon to be hung upside-down in bunches in my shed, along with a tray of Spanish moss harvested from a cypress tree near the beach.

Being an herbalist has been a lifelong dream of mine, and I had thought it was brought on by all the young adult fiction I read as a girl, where there was a wise old woman living in a cottage somewhere who had healing plants growing all around her. It turns out that it has been part of my nighttime dreaming too, for just as long. Digging in the ground these past few weeks I started remembering many dreams I have had through the years of finding the woman with the herb garden and listening to her stories.

In a sense, this whole full moon has been a waking dream for me, where I rise in the morning and step outside into a long-forgotten dream that is now being tended, and watered, and bearing its first harvest. I pick my herbs and carry them inside, notice what plants are growing well and which need more care, and give them all a drink before the heat of the day.

When I go back inside to sit at my desk, the garden outside keeps growing. I feel buoyed by the life in the ground, the fragrant herbs scenting my fingers and clothes, the color reflected back to me through my windows. It is a good feeling—a great feeling—new, yet vaguely familiar.

I find myself sifting through other people’s dreams now, searching for the dried-up survivors of ancient dreams which keep appearing and refuse to die, calling out for water, waiting to bloom again. The tenacity of the soul, and the speed with which it can recover from years of neglect: these are the gifts of my first dream harvest.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Dreams, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.