The Healing Garden (1)
A healing does occur, within the woman herself as she begins to nurture her body and soul and reclaim her feelings, intuition, sexuality, creativity and humor. There may be a sudden urge to take a ceramics or cooking class, to garden…
--Maureen Murdock
"The Heroine’s Journey"

I am not a gardener, yet I am passionately, radiantly in love with the garden sanctuary that has nudged itself into my world. It began a little more than a year ago. I felt an urge to do something drastic to what was then an ordinary backyard with weed-ridden grass, one tree and a moderately pleasing small flowerbed. I told my husband, Bob, I wanted to rearrange things – create xeriscape landscaping in recognition of the scarcity of the precious resource of water. I wanted to build mounds with flowers, add a patio and put in a privacy fence so we could enjoy our space without distractions from the alley behind. He was unenthusiastic—even questioned if we could legally do such things without city permits and permissions.

The pull inside of me was too strong to be dissuaded. I waited for Bob to leave town. Then I began. I had a dump truck load of topsoil delivered, hired a gardener to remove the dead and ailing trees and began digging up the lawn. The start was small, but significant. It made a statement—this is a backyard in motion. Things began to change.
Bob’s enthusiasm grew as he saw the colorful plans I created on graph paper. He began to catch sight of the vision: a garden sanctuary. The plans called for a spiral labyrinth in the center, a large flagstone patio to the west and a mounded flower bed to the east. We bought books on landscaping and talked about the kinds of trees, shrubberies and flowers we would like to have. The planning kept our enthusiasm high.

Soon I began to notice synchronicities that helped us move things along. It was as if the Mother was helping us. We found a likeness of her by accident when we attended an art exhibit. I discovered it—a four-foot tall iron sculpture of a joyful Goddess, exuberantly raising her arms to the heavens. I brought her home with me.

Several weeks later, while driving home from a meeting in northern Wyoming, I came across a road construction project where they had blasted large portions of a canyon wall, creating an enormous bed of stunning black rocks on the roadside. I wanted them! I collected a small sample and a geologist friend identified the rock as anorthosite, an igneous rock dating back 2.6 billion years. Later I discovered that the moon rocks on exhibit at the Smithsonian are also anorthosite. Ancient Mother! I will bring you home! Over the next few weeks I made trip after trip to the construction site in my Subaru and collected those beautiful rocks—about two tons in all.

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