We are drawn to places to heal, ourselves and the land itself.
They give us space to lick our wounds, to see the anger and disappointments of the human hearth from the more open embrace of the Earth.
I loved 'The Secret Garden' by Frances Burnett when I was young.
All the characters in there held aspects of my own sense of unease and wounding, all of them being healed and reunited by the unlocked garden.
Part of my mission it seems has been, in the lyric, "to get back to the garden". The other, larger part, which I have been shirking somewhat, is to help other people do the same.
I think that we are also drawn to places that reflect how we regard ourselves. Maybe we are even born to such...
I have always been attracted to 'wasteland': the bits behind the hoardings, the bombsites and abandoned industrial land, the waysides and backs of garages. Birmingham was a generous provider of such sites.
The house we grew up in though had more of the rambling, eccentric dereliction of The Secret Garden about it, and we were allowed to contruct our dens and treehouses by liberal parents.
I sense that my mother, Leebe, understood the hunger of my heart for deeper connection to the Earth. As children, we went on so many holidays to Burton Bradstock in Dorset, that it became a mutual paradise. If I couldn't sleep, she would stroke my forehead and suggest that I imagine myself there.
There is no denying this Age-old feeling of our loss of Eden. A need for an 'ancestral land; it's in all of us.
There is though an increasing sense of urgency about you, us, we, unlocking that gate back into this Earth mother's generous heart.
All around you is Garden
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