To Dance in the Garden

Each soul harbors a garden where a true story dwells in seed form, waiting to be watered with attention and nourished with genuine emotion. Any genuine attention to the soul garden acts like an inner sun warming our lives and helping to ripen the inner fruits. The soul is supposed to ripen during its sojourn in the garden of earthly suffering and delight. If we find a path of meaning in the world, the inner fruits ripen and become a resource and nourishment inside as well as a source of sweetness and reassurance to those we encounter on the way. The innate seeds produce the inner tree of our lives that grows as we grow, taking root where we live, trying to express why we live.

In the end we stand in our lives like an old tree. We are indelibly and undeniably connected to trees. We need the oxygen they offer us and need them to transform the carbon dioxide we continually exude, whether we be arguing our fate or meditating quietly. We began essential exchanges with trees before birth and the first breath we took in this world secretly drew upon the trees. Tested by storms of confusion, weathered by internal climates, withered in some places, and hopefully bearing unique fruit, we stand like an old tree, rooted in imagination, leaning at life.

There is a kind of boldness that is necessary when the time comes to fully enter the dance of life. “Dance or die,” say native people, who see all of life as a dance and all the genuine ways of being as forms of dancing with spirit or dancing the motions of the soul. When people feel lost in life they have lost their rhythm for life. In the midst of the ashes of whatever bridges have been burned or dreams that have come to nothing, it becomes necessary to find one’s internal rhythm again.

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