The Garden

In love and in life, there is no guarantee. Much like a garden, we tend to, nurture and return to, through daily acts as best we can. All is done in full knowledge that the seeds we have sewn have every chance of never rising or cultivating into what we might have hoped.

The garden we begin with or take on has every chance of wintering, of losing its bloom for good and going to compost. There is a regenerative quality in the worlds we inhabit. Love never leaves - simply reforms, adapts, shifts and realigns.

Love cannot hold expectations. Relationships cannot be controlled or forced. They are wild and organic things. We can draw certain conditions and lay lines down for love to grow in but there is every chance that it will uproot and find a home elsewhere.

Try to accept the un-timed and unpredictable nature of love. How it tests your own foundations, courage and strength and invites you to surrender your comforts for depth. If you are lucky enough to bear fruit from your endeavours - find gratitude, grounding and appreciation in that.

Life is laced in disappointment but if we allow ourselves to create foundations, to plant solid intentions, despite the very real risk of fallow fields and devastation, we can live a life filled with courage, conviction, closeness and connection.

Gardens were made to bloom, to cultivate variety, beauty and harmony. The Japanese honour the holistic qualities and balance a garden can draw. In Greco-Roman traditions, gardens were a refuge and place of peace and solitude. In both Abrahamic traditions and many parables, it is the garden that is man's first home. Gardens have a rich history and ancient folklore of symbolising fertility, growth, transformation and seasonal variation.

If we can draw anything from the garden, it is that it offers both an opportunity to start something, to develop, to cultivate belonging and harmony, whilst also avowing degrees of wildness, spontaneous and the unplanned.

So, embrace the organic and welcome what feels natural. Tend to what you can in your relationships and keep returning, keep tending. Love can only be fed, not caught or controlled.

Balance your expectations of yourself with that of the wider world and that of your gardens. Give things time, space, expanse and freedom. Remove any agenda. Protect things as best you can and accept that at any moment it can all be lost. And you might have to start again.

So take courage, have patience and show up. We can never predict the movement of love, the shape of relationships or indeed life. What might grow out of the ground could be in the lap of the gods. Place trust in the process and make little gestures, little efforts, towards a tangible and healthy Eden.