My Neo-Zen garden.

Throughout literature, the garden has represented sanctuary. Voltaire’s world-weary Candide retired to cultivate his garden, contented with the philosophy of living a simple life, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”  The gardens I have cultivated in our various homes have always been contemplative spaces, an escape from the stressors and tedious demands of modern life, where people are quick to defend their positions rather than to actually communicate with one another. There is something essential and fundamental about being a part of nature and losing one’s self in the sensory delights to be found among what is green, vital, and growing.

At one time, I lived in and near Boston and was on a career track. My gardens in a pastoral exurb of Boston occupied more than an acre of abutting conservation land that could never be built upon. When I returned to my hometown in southwest Oklahoma, I simplified my life and made the transition from activism to artistry. Relocating to the Southwest region of the country, we moved to the city where my gardening space in a carefully manicured, prestigious neighborhood occupies a quarter of an acre, more an outdoor room than a garden to tend. Somehow, the metamorphosis seems appropriate given the austerity, the insularity, of our political and economic times.

Although I relinquished space, variety, and stimulation, I gave up little else beyond scale. My Neo-Zen sensibility is, at heart, my way of focusing on what is important, meaningful, and relevant to me. I create beauty through various media—writings, images, food, and gardens—as a portal to transcendence; within the constraints of scarcity, sustainability is attained through optimization. My garden lends itself to the elaboration of this elegant concept and worldview. Continue reading My Neo-Zen Garden