Secret Gardens

So, apparently, I'd been holding the map upside down. "Trout Brook Valley" is not an address that my GPS recognizes and it's already been established that I'm navigationally challenged.

Thank god for Tim. Somehow, he always knows exactly where he is and how to get where he's going. He calmly points the car in the exact opposite direction I'm insisting we need to go, and five minutes later we arrive at our destination.

That's right. The shameful truth is that this is all happening five minutes from our house. Go right ahead and insert joke about paper bag at your convenience.

The jeep bumps along a wooded dirt road that ends abruptly in an open field. Ah, this must be the place. I recognize it by the utter lack of identifying signs. These beekeepers are tricky like that.

(This isn't a post about bees or beekeeping. Not for the most part, anyway. But about that bee thing? Have I mentioned that on my personal coolness factor scale it rates super ridiculously high? What's that, you say? I have mentioned it? Oh, um, okay. Right.)

It's a perfect day. We find ourselves standing in a meadow under the bluest sky imaginable. The grass is impossibly green and flecked with wildflowers. It rolls out to meet the horizon, climbing a gentle slope to touch the sky. It bows in the breeze, and in it I can see the unseen, that same invisible movement I feel against my cheek, the breath of the universe.

The trees rustle and toss their heads as I look up into the silvery undersides of their branches. They sound like the sea. To the left is a blueberry orchard. Did you know that blueberry flowers are fragrant and white? I didn't. A cheerful sign emblazoned with a potbellied blue pig gives a friendly admonishment not to pick more than 2 quarts of berries at a time. Up the hill lies a grove of mature apple trees, improbably graceful for their gnarled branches. The local beekeepers group have been asked to place hives here to support the orchards and this has become the home of their pet project, the rearing of heartier queens.

Astonished, I feel like I've tumbled out the other side of the wardrobe into Narnia. The earth beneath my feet is part of a thousand acre land trust. It's less than five minutes from my house, it's ginormous, and it's utterly concealed behind a busy road. I'd driven past it a thousand times without ever knowing it was there.

In the midst of this wide open space I begin to soften around the edges. My heart becomes a terrain that's as expansive as the one around me and, suddenly, I can really breathe.

Have I stepped inside The Secret Garden, a favorite childhood book? Do you remember that story? I read my copy until the pages fell out. Sullen and jaundiced, the newly orphaned Mary Lenox is sent from her home in India to England, to live in her widowed uncle's care. Inevitably, she finds her way past a locked gate and high walls into the garden, which is, or course, a metaphor for her own heart, which has been locked away since the death of her parents. Of course the process requires a community, or a kula, and along the way the whole coterie of maladjusted misfits learn to flourish in the garden of self-discovery.

What I find interesting is that the flowering of the heart requires each of the characters to see past the walls, past the limitations of their own construction. They must look outside themselves to see within themselves, they must venture beyond what is comfortable and familiar to regain entry into the inner chambers of the heart, a place one from which one could never truly be denied access at all. And, of course, the story reminds us that there are undiscovered territories without and within and that yoga is a process of discovery.

So, I ask you, what undetected realms might be no more than five minutes from your own front door? What domains lie unexplored within your own heart? And what the heck are you waiting for?

Utterly gratuitous bee photo is used with the express permission of photographer Tim.

Comments

[Everyday Yogini]

We were just talking about this in the most literal sense tonight: Rome is a city that is full of secret nooks and crannies. They can be a block away and then, 6 months later, you stumble into it and wonder how the heck you never noticed it before.

Now I think maybe all places are like that, it just happens that Rome is so full of them, you can't help but run in to a few...

As always, a lovely post. Thank you Bernie!