Читать книгу The Twelve Gifts from the Garden - Charlene Costanzo - Страница 11

Introduction

Dear Reader,

I am not a master gardener. However, I have an abundance of appreciation for all things that sprout, grow, blossom, and bloom. I’m grateful for how plants soothe us and uplift us. I’m thankful that they feed our bodies, enrich our minds, and nourish our souls. Plants help us breathe. They have healing power. Wordlessly, they lead us toward understanding. They teach by example.

I’ve received a lot of guidance from plants, including lessons related to strength, beauty, courage, compassion, hope, joy, talent, imagination, reverence, wisdom, love, and faith. This is what I have to share, what I wish to share, in this book. If you are already familiar with my work, you know that I’m passionate about these twelve resources—which I call the Twelve Gifts. If you are not yet familiar with the Twelve Gifts, I hope you soon will be, by starting here. Familiar or not, I’d like to tell you what’s in this book and why I wrote it.

The Twelve Gifts from the Garden is a collection of discoveries, healing perceptions, and aha experiences I’ve had on Sanibel, an island off the southwest coast of Florida. Most events were triggered in a garden or in nature. Usually they were stirred by a “close encounter” with a plant. Each sharing contains something, often a lesson, about using our twelve inner gifts.

I was inspired, in part, to collect my musings and publish these “gifts from the garden” because I thoroughly enjoyed reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, which she wrote in the early 1950s on Florida’s Captiva Island. I have appreciated her thinking, admired her style, and delighted in the role seashells play in her essays. Although I was just a toddler at the time she wrote the bestseller, and I did not discover Gift from the Sea until I was almost forty, I have taken my own lessons from nature, especially plants, since my early childhood. And what Anne Morrow Lindberg did with shells on Captiva, I started doing with plants upon my first visit to Sanibel Island, well before I discovered her wonderful book. Please don’t compare my writing with her exquisite essays. Let the reflections in both books stand on their own. If you have not yet read Gift from the Sea, I highly recommend it. Right now, I’d like to shed light on how I began taking lessons from nature. As you read my story, consider your own relationship with flora and fauna.

Until I was ten years old, my parents and I lived in a redbrick ten-family apartment house in Linden, New Jersey. Perhaps because our apartment building was almost entirely surrounded by concrete, I found comfort in a small, neglected patch of dirt adjacent to our building. It served as my first garden. Enclosed within an unpainted picket fence, that desolate space sprung to life each summer when grasses tipped with tiny purple, orange, and yellow flowers filled the area. Though others called them weeds, those grasses stirred my joy and taught me that good things can be present in unpleasant circumstances.

On the opposite side from our apartment building stood a two-story home that housed a neighborhood tavern. For a time, I disliked that drab gray building. A large tavern sign hung above the porch steps. Beer advertisements glowed in the windows. Rheingold. Pabst. Schlitz. Through my eyes, the neon-decorated building seemed out of place among family homes.

But on midsummer mornings, when I looked through our kitchen window, my heart opened with gratitude and joy. From that window I saw no tavern, just masses of morning glories blooming bright and blue against the weathered gray clapboard on the side of that house. The flowers looked so alive, so pure. The vibrant sight of them climbing a large trellis thrilled me. I loved them to tears. That taught me that a shift in perspective can transform an experience.

One day, noticing colorful clothes of varied sizes hanging on clotheslines behind the tavern house, I realized that a family like mine lived there. My opinion of the building softened further. My initial observations, judgments, and feelings about that neighboring house played a part in my learning to look beyond first impressions and to see situations from different vantage points.

From wildflowers pushing through nearby sidewalk cracks I concluded that life has strength and determination. And if plants can thrive in unfavorable conditions, I can too. Since my first “garden,” I’ve been drawn to all sorts of green places. City parks. Cemeteries. Nurseries. Nature preserves. Each has taught me something.

In this book, I sometimes reach back to earlier times and other places I’ve experienced. I also jump around in time. Mostly, I share the insights I gained in a botanical garden on Sanibel Island. As you read, imagine you are walking the paths with me. Or envision being in the garden on your own or with loved ones. Notice what resonates within you. Listen and feel for your own insights. Even when you’re not physically present, this garden holds gifts for you. All of nature does.

Wishing you the best of life’s gifts,

—Charlene