My Meraki Garden — SpiritScout

August 2023

There are three parts to the framework of a spiritual life: insightful relationship with oneself, a strong personal value system, and a fulfillment of meaningful purpose. We each create and explore our unique spiritual paths using our intuition, influences, and appetites as our guide. The energy source for this growth is Meraki, the soul creativity or core put into something, the essence of our self that is devoted to our pursuits.

We are born with both divine feminine and masculine energies in this mix, and each has their strengths. For women adulting in the 70’s through the aughts, the rules for success were masculine driven: Productivity, Ambition, Leadership, Competition, and Control. We were programmed to have it all. Like the slim-cut men’s Levi jeans we squeezed our asses into, it was a one-size-fits-all career path. As a small business founder with three daughters born in four years, I drank the Kool-Aid of this cultural conditioning. I identified strongly with my charismatic and entrepreneurial father—it was what I knew. I had a lot of balls to keep in the air and this masculine-driven energy kept all my wheels turning nicely.

Reflecting on this diet of drive, I’m sad to see how unacknowledged and undervalued the feminine energies of Beauty, Softness, Surrender, Creativity, and Feeling were at that time, and how that impacted my mothering style. Brené Brown had yet to introduce the body of language that includes a deep understanding and valuing of vulnerability and empathy as a pathway to higher consciousness. Fortunately, every generation evolves to a higher human consciousness and my daughters have a much better understanding and integration of the divine energies. They are more courageous and creative in their choices and how they live their lives. They are not afraid to experiment, pivot, and re-brand; their paths are curvy and refreshingly unconventional.

The spiritual is already sowed into our humanity, and so we can choose to tap into it at any time. As I have matured and enjoy more discretionary time, I can see how flower gardening as a spiritual practice is helping me to access more of the feminine energies and expand my consciousness: Beauty, Softness, Surrender, Creativity, and Feeling are all a birthright I have begun to explore and enjoy later in life. Culturally, the divine feminine is on the rise as we become more aware of the needs of our precious planet; this benefits us all because we need a balance of both energies.

Salve to my soul, gardening connects me to a higher rhythm of nature: the weather, the soil, the birds, the wildlife. My purpose is to create and share beauty while honoring Nature’s plan at every turn. Gardening and gratitude are natural partners, there is a limitless potential to learn and endless intrigue about the miracles of every single plant. I love every step of my flower gardening process, April through October, as I spend time with myself in a mediation of wonder.

Beauty Some people go to church to commune with the divine, I go to my gardens, they are my cathedral of color. It is in this peaceful enclave, this sacred chapel of green love and riotous bloom that I can most fully experience the miracles of the universe, the absolute genius of a Divine being. Insects and birds have a parallel diversity if you prefer that genre, but for me the garden is the truest essence of interaction. I know that I am with Spirit when I am in my gardens. I suspend all consciousness and submit to the sublime. I marvel like a child at a particular shade of sherbet pink, and I feel like I am seeing it for the very first time.

Softness When I look at my gardens, I notice the different growth patterns and composition of each individual plant. Some flowers are just budding while others patiently await their moment of glory. The blooming schedule is in divine time for each particular plant. Mother Nature does not force or anger at flowers that take longer to bloom or admonish when their cycle is complete, a wonderful metaphor for our own growth process. I can practice joy not judgment here. As the Philosopher Lao Tzu said, ‘Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.’

Surrender Gardening is an invitation to partner with Spirit, like in every other task of life—washing a dish, slicing a tomato, issuing an apology—these are all ways to embrace spirit. By definition, it is impossible to have permanent satisfaction with a garden. It is an ever changing, amorphous creature. Rather, I live for that divine dissatisfaction that keeps me coming back for more conversation and creativity. Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I go outside, I walk the gardens, and my small thinking and worries are instantly diluted by the vast, glorious atmosphere of the sky. Everything comes into perspective, and I can think again.

Creativity Spirituality is an awareness of the transcendent, surprise flashes of genius design. Flower gardening makes this manifest in a moving meditation of connecting with nature. I don’t have an agenda or a goal, I reiki the flowers and they guide the action. It is a prayer; it is belonging; it is failure and forgiveness; it is faith; it is yoga; it is magic in the making. This is what keeps me returning again and again to the multitudes of my flower garden. A catalog from the White Flower Farm, sharing plants with other gardeners, dahlias on Instagram, a field trip to the plant nursery (my version of a candy store)—all are places I go to inspire my creativity. I cherish these opportunities and my feminine energy is freed in this fugue of flowers and mud.

‘There is a vitality a lifeforce, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because it is only one of you, in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, ignore it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. It is your business to keep the creative channel open!’ —Martha Graham

Feeling To stay sane, get to the ground, get in a garden—it will do wonders for your nervous system. You don’t even need a plot—a pot and some dirt will do. Listen to the trees, the birds, they all want to contribute. Time goes away and all the senses engage. Fertile soil, the lake air so fresh and narcotic it knocks out babies on arrival, the whispering pines. That pull to fully immerse myself into the soil gives my feminine nurturer a healthy place to express now that the children are grown. The opportunity to play uninterrupted for hours, to indulge myself after so many years of commitments and interruptions, it’s like a salve to my soul. It repairs all the micro tears in my heart, and I can physically feel my ribs meshing back into their natural formation.

This is a place where the Divine permeates the air, the spiritual and the ordinary integrate effortlessly here, like the garden and the grass. I turn on my Merlin app to find out what winged friends will be joining me in the garden this morning. Blue jays, cardinals, the tufted titmouse, a nuthatch, the yellow warbler, always company, always a concert. The mourning doves stir something deep in my heart and connect me to those who have passed. I often see my dad, the hummingbird, popping into to survey his favorite striped petunias, columbine, and cardinal flowers. He doesn’t stay long, but his visits make me smile.

Sometimes I am quiet, other times I listen to an audible book. Last week, as I curated and clucked, I swooned while Meryl Streep read me Ann Patchett’s ‘Tom Lake’. It was as close to summer nirvana as I’ve come in 2023. Sometimes my heart is so full that I need to listen to opera, which I know nothing about, but it opens my cells and rushes my blood, and suddenly I can feel so much more, so quickly; sometimes I even cry.

All of life’s lessons are contained in the biosphere of the garden. As I dig below the superficial to the supernatural, I can more easily disconnect the habit of emotional bypassing—I become more aware of the obvious. When did it finally occur to me that gardening is not just a hobby, but a spiritual practice for me? Recently, and I named it ‘Attitude is the difference between ordeal and adventure.’

I was talking to Stealth about our weekly schedule of back and forth to the lake, where my gardens live, and I said ‘Oh, I can’t leave my window box flowers too long without water.’ And he said, ‘Well you don’t want to be held hostage by a bunch of petunias, do you?’ I stopped in my tracks and said, ‘Yes, actually, I do. I see my plants as a choice not a chore, and this is what makes all the difference.’ It’s how we think about things that makes for happiness.

Caring for my plants are meraki moments that fill me up; they are not a box to check or a task to inconvenience me. I dream about my flower boxes and gardens all winter, they feed me year-round. Just hearing this in a digestible way, how he got me to think about it on much deeper level was an amazing communication moment for us. Instead of me feeling like he didn’t care or was criticizing me, by framing it as a spiritual practice for myself, we both looked at it with much more respect and gravitas. We named it, and it took on an identity that we could behold. I felt seen and appreciated, not disparaged, it was a metanoia moment, and it filled us both up. Just because flowers don’t hold the same depths of pleasure for him, at least now he has a better idea of what it means to me—these benefits of beauty that feed my joy. As he gets a better shot at what my bliss point looks like, his aim improves, and so does everything else.

The vicissitudes of the garden, as in life, are what make it endlessly intriguing. I am loving the way that integrating the divine feminine energies is permeating other aspects of my life. I am seeing it in the way that I cook, the way that I move my body, and in my general demeanor. I am more relaxed and less Virgo-perfectionistic. I calmly make room for the spent blooms and weeds among the beauty, and there is a fine feeling of balance within the garden of my life.