When our desire moves us to make something, we begin to naturally start assembling bits and pieces into a kind of order. It doesn’t matter what we are working on, a piece of writing, a painting, a piece of furniture. There is an ordering process that is common to all creative works.
The easiest place to see this is in a garden, where plants are used to define space according to color or utility.
The end result, the created object, reflects an ordering process that is going on inside our hearts and minds.
A garden, for instance, is on some levels a reflection of our heart’s desire.
Architect Christopher Alexander put it this way:
The most wonderful thing about your garden is that you can do almost anything that you want there. In my picture of the world, these gardens, thousands of them, reflect not only the beauty of nature, flowers, vegetables, trees. They reflect, too, our own heart’s desire, a place where we may see the individuality and love of different people expressed in the most ordinary way, a million-fold.
The Nature of Order, Book Three, A vision of a Living World, page 249
Also on Wild Rye
A garden in some sense is our spiritual home. A place to which we seek to return. SEE Back to the Garden.
The garden interacts with more than the heart. There is a complex relationship between The Garden and the Mind.
