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Spring 2007
Spiritual Gardening:Tending the Earth and Ourselves
Not surprisingly, the word paradise comes from the Persian pairidaeza, meaning garden. A garden is a place of beauty, peace and calm. It is place where the wild and the domestic come together lovingly nurtured by human hands. It is a place of life and vibrancy. It is a place of creation and creativity. To plan and plant and grow a garden is a truly creative act. Like ourselves, they naturally change from year to year, but can also be radically transformed in a short space of time.
In my own spiritual practice, I often use the garden as a metaphor for personal growth and spiritual understanding. I find it helpful to tune my soul into the same rhythms that are going on in the natural world around me. To do so I try to participate in some sort of physical gardening. The garden doesn't have to large, it simply has to be something that ties me to the local seasonal patterns: for example, an herb box on the window ledge, a single tomato plant on the balcony, or participation in local community support agriculture (CSA) with weekly deliveries of farm-fresh goodies.
In this issue, we offer practical tips for working with this metaphor. Kristin Gaulin offers suggestions for families to create their own outdoor garden sanctuary together. Josie Baker explores what lessons the compost can teach us about cycles of death, decay and rebirth. « Life abounds in this world of warm, dark, decay, » she writes in her article Magical Transformation. Meanwhile in Gravel to Garden, Janice Wright offers urban pagans some practical advice for transforming their neighbourhoods and creating gardens for themselves in some unusual places. In Moon-Wise Gardening, Amanda Strong writes about how the moon may influence more than tides and spells.
Many of the herbs and plants used for making magical brews, potions and incense are readily available at retail outlets; but a lot are also available in our own backyards, forests and parks. In Celebrating Your Local Environment - An Introduction to Wildcrafting, Arin Murphy-Hiscock introduces the basics of the age-old practice of wildcrafting. Also in this issue, Arin offers her top picks for books on gardening and spiritual engagement with nature.
In other areas, Hobbes writes in our Community section about what is becoming a new monthly tradition for some Montreal-area pagans: the Pagan Sunday Brunch on the last Sunday of every month at Dusty's. Meanwhile, in the Perspectives section, Juan K offers his thoughts on Western influence on contemporary pagan understandings of the Divine. As usual, we have a handful of book reviews in this issue. Two relate to our Spiritual Gardening theme: The Way of the Green Witch is the third book by a local authour, and Gardens of the Gods looks at sacred gardens around the world, and the garden as metaphor. The third book, The Recovery Spiral, explores 12-step recovery programs from a pagan worldview.
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