I spent the last week in Green Cay, U.S. Virgin Islands in creative process, in conversation and – ultimately – in exploration of the deeper colors of life. What does it mean to be surrounded by beauty? What does it mean to be resourced by the earth?
Blessed be the Creator God – who made the heavens and the earth. 2 Chronicles 2:12
Part of this exploration was related to how, on an island, you celebrate the rain for filling up the cisterns, you wait for the sun to power up the panels before you do your laundry. This coordination with nature is and of itself a deeply desired internal rhythm I know I have, but I truly think we all have in our innate humanity.
What child doesn’t want to love and feel love from its mother?
Being in community with women who not only lived this way, but discussed which fish were eating which fish, increasing the big fishes’ mercury and who marveled over who had what trees growing on their property was nourishing and replenishing. Like rain to the cistern of my heart :)
Waking up this morning in the midwest with the type of tan I have found you really only get in St. Croix, I walked my garden similar to how I walked Samadhi by the Sea, the garden of my beautiful host for the week, Riya – a chakra oriented artist whose sculpture garden served as the key dwelling place for me and my creative spirit.
My garden – with it’s patchy weirdness, spiraling thin weeds and a serious need of mulch looked much different than Samadhi by the Sea. Thoughtfully still, I took my prayer beads and charged them by one of my favorite 2025 plantings: a baby rosemary shrub I am going to experiment with sheltering over the winter. I walked my garden slowly, kneeling down, looking carefully – naming what I believe are its main centers.
I moved the lemon eucalyptus and the pineapple sage together (near the “The Stump of Contemplation”) so they could be friends as they will both fruit Christmas gifts for my friends when I harvest their leaves, dry them out and bundle them for smudging gifts later on. I texted a dear family friend and studio member, Kim Joern – a master gardener and herbalist – for insight on my lavender. I danced in my garden when a neighbor stopped on her drive by. I pulled a few more weeds, said a few more prayers, noted a few more tasks and came inside.
One of the takeaways from my trip is a new installation in my vocabulary of the word “sacred” before key nouns in my sentences. Like the gold paperclips I picked up on my first day on island were dubbed sacred paperclips and kept all week in a dish, I started seeing the weird, the unorganized, the unmulched, the unattended parts of my Garden of Knowing as sacred.
My list of next round needs? A sacred rain barrel, small sacred fencing for the hostas… Among other things, of course, like sacred stones.
There is this stoic thought about how you cannot tell an emerald it is beautiful and it all the sudden becomes beautiful. Likewise you cannot tell it is is ugly and it becomes ugly. Rather, the nature of the emerald is that of an emerald, its nature is derived from itself.
As I spent time in my newly appointed sacred garden, in its overgrown honeysuckle and hidden irises, I reflected on how nature simply becomes. It unfolds without rush or definition. More rain does one thing, less rain does another. Early falls do things like late springs, hot summers and cold winters are an active part of the unfolding.
I promised my garden I would write in it. And I saw the process of the gardening serve up a lesson as I walked up the steps again (similar to a 12 hour writing day a few days ago, when I ascended and descended the steps of Samadhi by the Sea over and over and over and over).
“Discipline means walking up the steps again.”
It is my recent finding that the faithfulness to the process seems to be more important than the dedication to the outcome itself.
To allow my garden its sacred nature brought the same wave of gratitude and inspiration, nourishment and knowing as the waves crashing ear’s distance away from the vibrant intentionality of Samadhi by the Sea.
Frozen Spaghetti 