Perception Of My Garden

This passage from The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields sums up, not only the garden I'd love to eventually have, but how I feel about it at this particular moment in time.

"(Her) garden, these good friends claim, is so fragrant, verdant, and peaceful, so enchanting in its look of settledness and its caressing movements of shade and light, that entering it is to leave the troubles of the world behnd. Visitors standing in this garden sometimes feel their hearts lock into place for an instant, and experience blurred primal visions of creation - Eden itself, paradise indeed.

It is, you might almost say, her child, her dearest child, the most beautiful of her offspring, obedient but posessing the fullness of its spaces, its stubborn vegetable will. She may yearn to know the true state of the garden, but she wants even more to be part of its myteries. She understands, perhaps, a quarter of its green secrets, no more. In turn it perceives nothing of her, not her history, her name, her longings, nothing - which is why she is able to love it as purely as she does, why she has opened her arms to it, taking it as it comes, as every leaf, every stem, every root and sign."

Oh, to have a garden like that!