Religion
Spirituality, Sacredness, Divine

Quotes for Those that Love
Gardens, Gardening and the Green Way

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

Nature Mysticism    Nature Spirits     Via Positiva  

Spirituality and Gardening     NeoPaganism

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station through
which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
-  George Washington Carver

God Almighty first planted a garden.
-   Frances Bacon,  1561 - 1626

Nature Spirits

One Old Druid's Final Journal: Notebooks of the Librarian of Gushen Grove

It is this subtle dimension of understanding that marks the southwestern
Indian peoples from other religions and separates tribal peoples from the
world's religions.  Somewhere in the planetary history religious expression
changed from participation in the sound, color and rhythm of nature to
the abstractions of man outside this context pleading for temporary respite
and hoping in the next life to return to the Garden.
-   Vine Deloria, Jr., Frank Waters, Prophet and Explorer

Adam was a gardener, and God, who made him, sees that
half of all good gardening is done upon the knees.
-   Rudyard Kipling

Whenever learners or those beyond learning awaken the mind, for the first time they plant one buddha-nature.  Working with the four elements and five clusters, if they practice sincerely they attain enlightenment.  Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment.  This is because the four elements and five clusters and plants, trees, fences and walls are fellow students; because they are of the same essence, because they are the same mind and the same life, because they are the same body and the same mechanism.
-   Dogen Zenji, Japanese Zen Buddhist Grand Master
Awakening the Unsurpassed Mind, #31
Translated by Thomas Cleary, Rational Zen:  The Mind of Dogen Zenji
Vegetable Nirvana by Ito Jakuchu

Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels
perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
-  Aldous Huxley

Although we all possess the seeds of great love and compassion,
without the light of the enlightened one's wisdom and the waters
of their compassion these seeds would never spout.
-  Philip Kapleau

For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
-  Luke 17:21

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden.
There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that
there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic
with respect to fairies?
-   Richard Dawkins

He who owns a garden,
However small it be,
Whose hands have planted in it
Flower or Bush or Tree;
He who watches patiently
The growth from nurtured,
Who thrills a newly opened bloom
Is very close to God
-   Katherine Edelman, He Who Owns a Garden

Flower in the crannied wall
I pluck you out of the crannies
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand.
Little flower, but if I could understand,
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
-  Alred Tennyson (1809-1892), Flower in the Crannied Wall

It is a glorious privilege to live, to know, to act, to listen,
to behold, to love.  To look up at the blue summer sky;
to see the sun sink slowly beyond the line of the horizon;
to watch the worlds come twinkling into view, first one
by one, and the myriads that no man can count, and lo!
the universe is white with them; and you and I are here.
-   Marco Morrow

When men do not love their hearth, nor reverence their thresholds,
it is a sign that they have dishonoured both ... Our God is a house-hold God,
as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's dwelling.
-   John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1908

Heed ye Flower, Bush and Tree,
By the Lady, Blessed Be.
Where the rippling waters go,
Cast a stone and truth you'll know.
-  Dragon Willow

"An it harm none, do what thou wilt."

When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves.
-  David Orr

I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God
it would be in a garden at the cool of the day.
-  F. Frankfort Moore

The Great Way has no gate.
Clear water has no taste.
The tongue has no bone.
In complete stillness, a stone girl is dancing.
-   Seung Sahn

why do you suppose
that every understanding
prior to a real understanding
feels like something
to impose on others?
-  Benjamin Dean, Coffee Stains

Just as a prism of glass miters light and casts a colored braid, a garden 
sings sweet incantations the human heart strains to hear.  Hiding in every 
flower, in every leaf, in every twig and bough, are reflections of the God 
who once walked with us in Eden.
-   Tonia Triebwasser, The Color of Grace

In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. 
But all these times and places and occasions are now
and here.  God himself culminates in the present
moment, and will never be more divine in the
lapse of all the ages.
-   Henry David Thoreau, Walden

A wee child toddling in a wonder world ...   I prefer to their dogma my 
excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit 
is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and 
the sweet breathing of flowers.  If this is Paganism, then at present, 
at least, I am a Pagan.
-   Zitkala-Sa

So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to thee.
-   Samuel Taylor Coleridge

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.
-   Alfred Jarry

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in
relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely
far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings
are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is
equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was
drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.
-  Blaise Pascal

Wherever you are is home
And the earth is paradise
Wherever you set your feet is holy land . . .
You don't live off it like a parasite.
You live in it, and it in you,
Or you don't survive.
And that is the only worship of God there is.
-   Wilfred Pelletier and Ted Poole

God does not die on that day when we cease to believe in a personal 
deity, but we die when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady 
radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond 
all reasoning.  ...   When the sense of the earth unites with the sense 
of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, 
an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it.  In this union, the body 
is confirmed in its pantheism.

-   Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961)

Pathology is a relatively easy thing to discuss, health is very difficult. 
This, of course, is one of the reasons why there is such a thing as the
sacred, and why the sacred is difficult to talk about, because the
sacred is peculiarly related to the healthy.  One does not like to
disturb the sacred, for in general, to talk about something
changes it, and perhaps will turn it into a pathology.
-   Gregory Bateson, Ecology of Mind

Haiku and Zen Poetry

Yet, though it is like this, simply, flowers fall amid our longing
and weeds spring up amid our antipathy.
-  Zen Master Dogen, Genjokoan, 1200 - 1253

In last night's storm the beautiful blossoms all fell off.  Ah!  What a shame. 
When it rains for two or three days, again the weeds have grown up.  Oh, well.

Or

Even though flowers fall, don't regret it.  Even though weeds grow,
don't hate them.  Don't arouse the passions of attraction and repulsion,
hating and loving.  If only we don't arouse the passions, the falling of flowers
and the growing of weeds as they are is manifest absolute reality.
Zen Master Hakuun Yasutani, 1885 - 1973;
Flowers Fall, 1996, Translated by Paul Jaffe

A flower falls, even though we love it;
and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

Quotes for Gardeners
A Collection Growing to Over 3,300 Quotes Arranged by 135 Topics

The color of the mountains is Buddha's body;
the sound of running water is his great speech.
-  Zen Master Dogen

"I will need much help in growing this garden,
I cannot do it alone.
I ask for help from the Sun: give your light so the
    plants can make their food. 
I ask for help from the rain: give your moistures to be
    the plants' own blood.
I ask for help from the soil: give your minerals from
    which the plants will form their bodies.
I will give my time,
I will give my care,
I will give my loving stewardship,
All these I will give my garden." 

Prayer for Gardening 
Ceisiwr Serith, A Book of Pagan Prayer, p. 161 

Philosophy considers questions that may never be answered.
Religion has answers that need not be questioned.
-   Author Unknown, Adapted by Mike Garofalo

Holy Mother Earth, the trees and all nature,
are witnesses of your thoughts and deeds.
-  Winnebago saying

    Quite apart from our religion,
           There are plum blossoms,
  There are cherry blossoms.
   -   Nanpoku

"Rocks pray to," said Grandad.  "Pebbles and boulders
and old weathered hills.  They are still and silent, and
those are two important ways to pray."
-  Douglas Wood, Grandad's Prayers of the Earth.

That God once loved a garden we learn in Holy writ.
And seeing gardens in the Spring I well can credit it.
-  Winifred Mary Letts

"Speaking of today, I do not consider it intellectually respectable to be a partisan in matters of religion. 
I see religion as I see other basic fascinations as art and science, in which there is room for many
different approaches, styles, techniques, and opinions.  Thus I am not formally a committed member
of any creed or sect and hold no particular religious view or doctrine as absolute.  I deplore missionary
zeal, and consider exclusive dedication to and advocacy of any particular religion, as either the best or
the only true way, as almost irreligious arrogance.  Yet my work and life are fully concerned with
religion, and the mystery of being is my supreme fascination, though, as a shameless mystic, I am
more interested in religion as feeling and experience that as conception and theory."
-  Alan Watts, In My Own Way, p. 61, 1972

They tell us that plants are not like man immortal,
but are perishable—soul-less.  I think that is
something that we know exactly nothing about.
-  John Muir, Journal 1867

I circle around God, the primordial tower,
and I circle ten thousand years long;
and I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm,
or an unfinished song.
-  Rainer Maria Rilke, 1905

There's nothing more spiritual than watching what you've planted in the ground. 
You plant it, you nurture it, and God provides the sun and the rain and helps it 
to grow.  You see the absolute mystery in what God has given to us in growing 
things ... also the absolute beauty.  There's beauty in the simplest of things -- 
the flowers or the bark of a tree.  Sometimes it behooves us to stop and look.
-  Sister Christine, Natural Spirituality

Religion is an insult to human dignity.  With or without it, you'd have good people doing 
good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, 
it takes religion.
- Steven Weinberg

Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus,
but don't sit down without one of the gods.
-   D.H. Lawrence

It is not a large garden, but there is no sense of crowding.  In the
partially hidden recesses there is calm, in the grouping of the shrubs
there is symmetry of outline.  One feels that this corner is in harmony
with the great whole of which it is part.  Unconsciously one responds
to the spell of the environment, and the "spirit of God's out-of-doors."
-   Hazel Wood Waterman,  The House Beautiful (September 1902)

The sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir
    Will celebrate with green the Mother,
    And every song-bird shout awhile for her;
    But we are gifted, even in November
    Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense
    Of Her nakedly worn magnificence
    We forget cruelty and past betrayal,
    Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
-   Robert Graves, The White Goddess

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts, utterably vain;
Worthless as wither'd weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.
-   Emily Bronte, Last Lines

The shop, the barn, the scullery, and the smithy become temples
when men and women do all to the glory of God!  The "divine
service" is not a thing of a few hours and a few places, but all
life becomes holiness unto the Lord, and every place and thing,
as consecrated as the tabernacle and it's golden candlestick.
-  C. H. Spurgeon

Finding what brings peace and joy to your heart is important after a hard day at
work, or just living in our intense world.  Walking through your garden at the end of
the day can rejuvenate you.  I wonder if God, Allah, Jehovah, Shiva, Gaia or
whatever Supreme Being you have come to know, looks down on the Garden that
He or She created with all the different varieties of life and "oohs and aahs "?
It is a curious thought, but I think so.
-  Teresa Watkins, Gardening With Soul

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean 
felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.  
-   Charles Lamb

In the Quran it says that believers will be rewarded with the
splendors and bountiful beauty of paradise, which is described
as gardens in heaven.  Believers are promised gardens of heaven
that have gushing fountains and flowing springs, fruit trees, and
couches to recline in under the cool shade of trees.
-   The Muslim News

So many gods,
So many creeds,
North wind and South wind;
While just the art
Of being kind
Is all this sad world needs.
-  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

This earth is a garden,
The Lord its gardener,
Cherishing all, none neglected.
-   Sikhism. Adi Granth, Mahj Ashtpadi 1, M.3, p. 118

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes -
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
-  Elizabeth Barrett Browing

"From the colour the nature
                                    & by the nature the sign!"
      Beatific spirits welding together
                            as in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.
                      Baucis, Philemon.
                                                  -   Ezra Pound, Cantos XC

Man becomes aware of the Sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself,
as something wholly different from the Profane ... In his encounters with
the Sacred, man experiences a reality that does not belong to our world
yet is encountered in and through objects or events that are part of the world.
-   Mircea Eliade

In the garden the door is always open into the holy.
-   May Sarton

Great is our Lord, and of great power;
Who covereth the heaven with clouds,
Who prepareth rain for the earth,
Who maketh grass to grow upon the mountains.
-   Bible: Psalm 147

In the religion of the Medes and Persians the cult of trees plays an important part,
and with them, as with Assyrians, the symbol of eternal life was a tree with a stream
at its roots.  Another object of veneration was the sacred miracle tree, which
within itself contained the seeds of all.
-  M. L. Gothein, A History of Garden Art, 1928

Poltinus the Platonist proves by means of the blossoms and leaves that from 
the Supreme God, whose beauty is invisible and ineffable, Providence reaches
down to the things of earth here below.  He points out that these frail and mortal
objects could not be endowed with a beauty so immaculate and so exquisitely
wrought, did they not issue from the Divinity which endlessly prevades with its
invisible and unchanging beauty all things.
-   Saint Augustine, The City of God

Are what humans consider ugly, putrid, and decaying also attributed to Divine Providence? 

Who can estimate the elevating and refining influences and moral value 
of flowers with all their graceful forms, bewitching shades and combinations
of colors and exquisitely varied perfumes?  These silent influences are
unconsciously felt even by those who do not appreciate them consciously
and thus with better and still better fruits, nuts, grains, vegetables and
flowers, will the earth be transformed, man's thought refined, and turned
from the base destructive forces into nobler production.  One which will
lift him to high planes of action toward the happy day when the Creator
of all this beautiful work is more acknowledged and loved, and where man
shall offer his brother man, not bullets and bayonets, but richer grains, 
better fruit and fairer flowers from the bounty of this earth.

-   Father George Schoener (1864 -1941),
    The Importance and Fundamental Principles of Plant Breeding

Work  -  Quotes for Gardeners

If thy heart were right, then every creature would be a mirror of life and a book of holy doctrine. 
There is no creature so small and abject, but it reflects the goodness of God.
-  Thomas 'A Kempis, Imitation of Christ

I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God.
-  Alan Havhamess

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit
who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive
with our frail and feeble mind.
-  Albert Einstein

The Mother of Maize changed her dove appearance to a human one. 
She introduced to the young man her five daughters, who symbolize the
five sacred colors of maize: white, red, yellow, spotted and blue.  As the
young man was hungry, the Mother of Maize gave him a kettle filled
with tortillas and a pot filled with atole.  He didn't believe that those
could satiate his hunger, but the tortillas and atole were renewed
magically, in a way that he couldn't finish them.  The Mother of Maize
asked him to choose one of her daughters and he chose the
Girl of Blue Maize, the most beautiful and sacred of them all.

Huichol Legend from Mexico

Spirituality - Quotes for Gardeners

What greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants as with
a robe of embroidered works, set with Orient pearls and garnished with the great
diversitie of rare and costly jewels.  But these delights are in the outward senses.
  The principle delight is in the minde, singularly enriched with the knowledge of
these visible things, setting forth to us the invisible wisdome and admirable
workmanship of almighty God.
-  John Gerard, 1633, The Herbal

A callused palm and dirty fingernails precede a Green Thumb.
Complexity is closer to the Truth. 
All enlightened beings are enchanted by water.
Sitting in a garden and doing nothing is high art everywhere.
Does a plum tree with no fruit have Buddha Nature?   Whack!!   
The only Zen you'll find flowering in the garden is the Zen you bring there each day. 
Becoming invisible to oneself is one pure act of gardening.
  Priapus, lively and naughty, aroused and outlandish, is the Duende de el Jardin.
 Inside the gardener is the spirit of the garden outside.
Gardening is a kind of deadheading - keeping us from going to seed.   
The joyful gardener is evidence of an incarnation. 
God may have created the first garden, but, typical of Him, 
He got bored with trying to keep it up and make it better.
I never found God in my garden, but goddesses and gods dance everywhere.
One purpose of a garden is to stop time.
Leafing is the practice of seeds.   
-  Michael P. Garofalo,  Pulling Onions

Why should we cherish all sentient beings?
Because sentient beings
are the roots of the tree-of-awakening.
The Bodhisattvas and the Buddhas are the flowers and fruits.
Compassion is the water for the roots.
-   Avatamsaka Sutra

Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
-   Elizabeth Barret Browning

Natural objects themselves, even when they make no claim to beauty,
excite the feelings, and occupy the imagination.  Nature pleases, attracts,
delights, merely because it is nature. We recognize in it an Infinite Power.
-   Karl Wilhelm Humboldt

Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt.  Whatever it is
that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because
the time is short.  Civilization is another word for respect for life.
-   Elizabeth Goudge

No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories
and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important
variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.
Richard Dawkins

The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.
-   N. Scott Momaday

For here is religion that languishes in crowded cities or steals shame-faced
to hige itself in dim churches, flourishes greatly, filling the soul with a 
solemn joy.  Face to face with Nature on the vast hills at eventide, who
does not feel himself near to the Unseen?
-   W. H. Hudson, The Purple Land

Beauty - Quotes for Gardeners

Feed your faith and your fears will starve to death.

Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul.
- The Koran

What was paradise?  But a garden, an orchard of trees and herbs. 
Full of pleasure, and nothing there but delights.
-   William Lawson

Sowe Carrets in you Gardens,
and humbly praise God for them,
as for a singular and great blessing.
-  Richard Gardiner
Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchen Gardens (1599)

To cultivate a garden is to walk with God.
-  Christian Nestell Bovee

i thank you God for this most amazing
     day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
               and for the blue dream of sky and for everything
          which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes
      -  E. E. Cummings

The Lord God planted a garden
In the first white days of the world,
And he set there an angel warden
In a garment of light enfurled.

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
the song of the bird for mirth,
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.
- Dorothy Frances Gurney (1858-19320

There is surely a piece of divinity in us,
something that was before the elements,
and owes no homage to the sun.
-  Sir Thomas Brown, Religio Medici, 1870

I Welcome Your Comments and Suggestions

My father considered a walk among the mountains
as the equivalent of churchgoing.
-   Aldous Huxley

God in his wisdom created these places
And made them accessible to those of all races
Rare visions of beauty, and fragrant perfume
Distributed freely for all to consume. While
Enjoying
Nature, confessions and pardons
Sincerely flow forth, as love grows in God's Gardens
-   Catherine M. Prostak,  Gardens

Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and all that
is in it;  let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them. Then all the trees of the
forest will sing for joy;  they will sing before the Lord, for he comes, he comes
to judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his truth.
-  Psalm 96: 11-13."

Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.
-   Henry David Thoreau

St. Fiacre - Patron Saint of Gardeners

    Saint Fiacre lived at a monastery in Breuil, France, in the French diocese of Meaux.   He was an avid gardener, and cultivated many herbs, flowers and prepared potions that had useful medicinal value.  "The anchorite cleared the ground of trees and briars, made himself a cell with a garden, built an oratory in honor of the Blessed Virgin, and made a hospice for travelers which developed into the village of Saint-Fiacre in Seine-et-Marne."    "St. Fiacre's days at the monastery taught him a deep love of silence, the joys of planting and harvesting crops and an appreciation of nature."  People flocked to the village and Fiacre's hermitage to be healed.    Saint Fiacre died around  670 A.D.   "The fame of Saint Fiacre's miracles of healing continued after his death and crowds visited his shrine for centuries."  Today, he  is considered the patron saint of France's gardeners.  His feast day is on August 30th.  St. Fiacre is normally represented as a 1. monk working with a spade;  or,  2. as a monk standing with a spade before his well tended garden.    Statues of St. Fiacre can also be purchased.

"St. Phocas is the other patron saint of gardeners, and lived in the 3rd century. 
He dug his own grave in his garden when the lictors came to kill him because 
he was a Christian.  St. Francis of Assisi is also appropriate for the garden, 
since is a protector of animals. St. Isadore is the patron saint of farmers.
St. Dorothy is associated with flowers."
-   Gothic Gardening:   Something Wicked This Way Grows

Reading to Uplift a Gardener's Spirits

God gave all men all the earth to love but, since our hearts are so small,
ordained for each, one spot to be beloved over all.
-  Rudyard Kipling

We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow
men but also with nature and, above all, with those Higher Powers
which have made nature and have made us.
-  E.F. Schumacher

In this light, my spirit saw through all things
and into all creatures,
and I recognized God in grass and plants.
-  Jacob Boehme

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
-   Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods
and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books,
for they speak with the voice of God.
-   George Washington Carver

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.
-  Elbert Hubbard

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
-  Paul Valery

Hildegaard of Bingen was a twelfth-century mystic, composer, and 
author of a theology that knitted together nature and spirit, cosmos
and soul.   She described the Holy Spirit as the Greening Power of 
God.  Just as plants are greened, so we are as well.  As we grow up,
our spark of life continually shines forth.  If we ignore this spark, this
greening power, we become thirsty and shriveled.  And if we respond
to the spark, we flower.  Our task is to flower, to come into full blossom
before our time comes to an end.
-   Lauren Artress, Walking a Sacred Path

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.
-  T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday, 1930

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere
and the circumference is nowhere.
-  Empedocles

Just to be is a blessing.
Just to live is holy.
-  Rabbi Abraham Heschel

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards
the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men 
in their own image to be servants of their human interests.
-   George Santayana

The best place to seek God is in a garden.  
You can dig for him there.
-  George Bernard Shaw
The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 1932

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
 

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
 

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
 

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.
 

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
 

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
 

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
 

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

-  Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, 1952
 

Gardening and Spirituality
An essay by Mike Garofalo

Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication,
and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to
a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.
-   Author Unknown

Lord make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom
in these days to make the world beautiful for us.
-  W. E. DuBois

The sun will set without thy assistance.
-  The Talmud

A handful of men working within the Zen sect of Buddhism created gardens in fifteenth-century
Japan which were, and still are, far more than merely an aesthetic expression.   And what is left
of the earlier Mogul gardens in India suggests that their makers were acquainted with what
lay behind the flowering of the Sufi movement in High Asia and so sought to add
further dimensions to their garden scenes.
-   Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener, 1962

People are always talking about tradition, but they forget we have
a tradition of a few hundred years of nonsense and stupidity, that
there is a tradition of idiocy, incompetence and crudity.
-   Hugo Demartini

An old argument with me is that the true religious force
in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the 
mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.
-  Wallace Stevens

He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God.
-  William Blake, There is No Natural Religion, 1788

Belief?  What do I believe in?   I believe in sun.  In rock.  In the dogma of the
sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers,
eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses...."
-   Edward Abbey

                      We consider bibles and religions divine-- I do not say they are
                             not divine,
                       I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you
                             still,
                       It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,
                       Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth,
                       than they are shed out of you. 
                                                 -    Walt Whitman, Song for Occupations

So that a paradise, among them seems to have been a large space of ground adorned
and beautified with all sorts of trees, both of fruits and of forest, either found there
before it was enclosed, or planted after; either cultivated like gardens, for shades and
for walks, with fountains or streams, and all sorts of plants usual in the climate, and
pleasant to the eye, the smell, or the taste; or else employed like our parks, for
enclosure and harbor of all sorts of wild beasts, as well, as for the pleasure of
riding and walking: and so they were of more or less extent, and of different
entertainment, according to the several humors of the Princes
that ordered and enclosed them.
-   Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or, Of Gardening.  By Sir William Temple, 1685. 

Trees - Quotes for Gardeners

Let every Christian be a gardener so that he and she and the whole
of creation, which groans in expectation of the Spirit's final harvest,
may inherit Paradise.  If we Christian's truly treasure the hope that
one day we, like Adam and the penitent thief, will walk alongside the
One who caused even the dead wood of the Cross to blossom with
flowers, then we must also imitate the Master's art and make
the desolate earth grow green.
Vigen Guroian, Inheriting Paradise

Flowers are the sweetest thing God ever made, 
and forgot to put a soul into. 
-   Henry Beecher

Some flowers have souls, and some people have none.

A disciple once complained, "You tell us stories, but you never reveal their meaning to us." 
The master replied, "How would you like it if someone offered you fruit and then
chewed it up for you before giving it to you?"

If your heart is straight with God,
then every creature will be to you
a mirror of life
and a book of holy doctrine.
-  Thomas à Kempis

Shamrock of foliage, Shamrock of entwining,
Shamrock of the prayer,  Shamrock of my love.
Shamrock of my sorrow, Plant of Patrick of the virtues,
Shamrock of the  Son of Mary,  Journey's end of the peoples.
Shamrock of grace, Of joy, of the tombs,
It were my wish in death You should grow on my grave.
-  Translated by Alexander Charmichael

I think that gardening is nearer to godliness than theology.
-   Vigen Guroian, Inheriting Paradise

How wonderful, O Lord, are the works of your hands,
the sun and the stars, the valleys and the hills, the rivers
and lakes all disclose your presence.  The beasts of the
field, the birds of the air bespeak your wondrous will. 
In your goodness you have made us able to hear the
music of the world, a divine voice sings
through all creations.
-   Hebrew prayer

Even in a single leaf of a tree, or a tender blade of grass,
the awe-inspiring Deity manifests Itself.
-   Shinto. Urabe-no-Kanekuni

Anyone can count the number of seeds in an apple,
but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.
-  Robert H. Schuller

I Welcome Your Comments and Suggestions

The story of mankind began in a garden and ended in revelations.
-  Oscar Wilde

The Country is both the Philosopher's Garden and his Library,
in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.
-  William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude In Reflections And Maxims, 1682

What a difference! What a difference!
Raise the blind, and see the world!
If someone asks me to tell him what my religion is
I raise my hossu and strike his mouth.
-   Chokei, 853 - 932

 

The good gardener knows with absolute certainty that if he does his part, if he gives
the labour, the love, and every aid that his knowledge of his craft, experience of the
conditions of his place, and exercise of his personal wit can work together to suggest,
that so surely will God give the increase.  Then with the honestly-earned success
comes the consciousness of encouragement to renewed effort, and, as it were,
an echo of the gracious words, 'Well done my good and faithful servant'.
-   Gertrude Jekyll, Wood and Garden, 1899

The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.
-   John Burroughs

Listen to all the teachers in the woods.
Watch the trees, the animals and all living things -
you'll learn more from them than from books.
-   Joe Coyhis

I care not much for a man's religion
whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
-   Abraham Lincoln

We were born to die and we die to live.  As seedlings of God,
we barely blossom on earth; we fully flower in heaven.
-  Russell M. Nelson, General Conference of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 1992

The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, 
is the root of all evil in the world.
-   Max Born

Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren't just will and thoughts.
We're also sand and wind and thunder. Rain.  The seasons. All
those things. You learn to respect everything because you are
everything.  If you respect yourself, you respect all things.
-  Least Heat Moon

"Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round
about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world.  And while I stood
there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for
I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit,
and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
An I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops
that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the
center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of
one mother and one father.  And I saw that it was holy."
-   Black Elk Speaks, The Great Vision, 1932, p. 36

The Ten Commandments of Gardening

Thou shalt be patient till it's thyme to garden
Thou shalt be outstanding in thy field
Thou shalt lovingly care for the Earth
Thou shalt weed thy garden diligently
Thou shalt take time to smell the flowers
Thou shalt keep a fresh from the garden attitude
Thou shalt give freely of the bounty of thy harvest
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors soil
Thou shalt listen to your Garden Angels
Thou shalt bloom where you are planted and
grow strong under God's tender care.
-  Garden Quotes

When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the
word - religion.  Then I go out and paint the stars.
-   Vincent Van Gogh

Indian monks were the first to choose the garden as the proper setting for their lives, which were devoted to the contemplation of the divine; but with a prophetic eye we may see that the garden will often be dedicated in a like manner: at a later time Greek philosophers, and monks in early Christian days, will retire into their gardens for united, yet silent, contemplation.
-  Marie L. Gothein, A History of Garden Art, 1928, p.50

Believe one who knows:
You will find something greater in woods than books.
Trees and stones will teach you
that which you can never learn from masters
-   Bernard of Clairvaux

When one Buddha who perfected the Way
beholds the Dharma world,
all those in the plant-and-tree realms,
without exception,
attain Buddhahood.
-  Keami, Nue (a No libretto), circa 1440
Vegetable Nirvana by Ito Jakuchu

On the holy boughs of the Celestial Tree
High up in the heavenly fields,
Beyond terrestrial desire
My soul-bird a warm nest has built.
-  Hafiz.

Of course the Dharma-body of the Buddha was the hedge at the
bottom of the garden.  At the same time, and no less obviously,
it was these flowers, it was anything that I - or rather the
blessed Not-I  - cared to look at.
-   Aldous Huxley

To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.
-  Zen Master Dogen

The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God.
-  Benedict De Spinoza

God is in the details.
-  Mies Van Der Rohe

Caress the detail, the divine detail.
-   Vladimir Nabokov

Details are all there are.
-  Maezumi Roshi

We think in generalities, but we live in details.
-  W.H. Auden

If you take care of the little things, the big things take care of themselves.
-   R. Reese

We work with the stuff of the soul by means of the things of life.
-   Thomas Moore

Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones.
Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave.
-  William Blake

The object of our lives is to look at, listen to, touch, taste things.
Without them, - these sticks, stones, feathers, shells, -
there is no Deity.
-  R. H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, p. 144.

When we look for things there is nothing but mind,
and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.
  -   Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, p 131

"Do things noncoercively (wuwei),
Be non-interfering in going about your business (wushi),
And savor the flavor of the unadulterated in what you eat.

Treat the small as great
and the few as many.

Requite enmity with character (de).

Take account of the difficult while it is still easy,
And deal with the large while it is still tiny.  
The most difficult things in the world originate with the easy,
And the largest issues originate with the tiny.

Thus, it is because the sages never try to do great things
That they are indeed able to be great.

One who makes promises lightly is sure to have little credibility;
One who finds everything easy is certain to have lots of difficulties.

Thus, it is because even the sages pay careful attention to such things
That they are always free of difficulties.

Chapter 63, Daodejing
Translation by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall
Daodejing "Making This Life Significant": A Philosophical Translation, (2003), p. 175. 

Classics: Ancient Wisdom for Making This Life Significant

Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions,
literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time
and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people
back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions,
to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.
-   Walt Whitman

The growth of all the plants of the garden from seeds and roots
keep us mindful, in accordance with of the Parable of the Sower, of
the need for our loving, mortified reception and cultivation in our
hearts and souls of the seeds and roots of the supernatural gifts
and virtues necessary for progress in the ascetical/mystical ascent
of our souls toward union with God and with the divine will for
Creation and Kingdom
-   John S. Stokes, Jr., Flower Theology II

A grove of giant redwoods or sequoias should be kept
just as we keep a great or beautiful cathedral.
- Theodore Roosevelt

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven
unless it be through Earth's lovliness.
-  Michelangelo Buonardo

He would sit on a wooden bench leaning against a decrepit trellis and
look at the stars through the irregular outlines of his fruit trees.  This
quarter of an acre of ground, so sparingly planted, so cluttered with
shed and ruins, was dear to him and satisfied him. 
What more was needed by this old man, who divided the leisure hours of
his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime and
contemplation at night?  Was this narrow enclosure with the sky for a
background not space enough for him to adore God in his most beautiful,
sublime works?  Indeed, is that not everything? What more do you need?
A little garden to walk in, and immensity to reflect on. At his feet something
to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate on;
a few flowers on earth and all the stars in heaven.
-  Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Interdependence - Quotes for Gardeners

The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed
according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in
which is their seed, each according to its kind.  And God
saw that it was good.  And there was evening and
there was morning, a third day.
-   Genesis 1:9-13,  To Bring Forth Fruit

Some spirits are stronger than others, says al-Kindi.  The farm
spirit is one of the strong ones, the needed ones.  The Greeks
worshiped a daimon of the farm and their stories called him
Aristaeus.  Known as "the best god of all," he was famous
as the guardian spirit of beekeeping, orchards, and farms.
-   Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, p. 336.

Wise sayings often fall
on barren ground,
but a kind word
is never thrown away.
-   Sir Arthur Helps

"Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair." 
-  G.K.Chesterton

Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you
awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father's Palace; and look
upon the skies, the earth, and the air as Celestial Joys; having
such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels.
-  Thomas Traherne, 1670

Let your religion be less of a theory
and more of a love affair.
-   G.K. Chesterton

Two hands working can do more
than a thousand clasped in prayer.

A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe
as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves
of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.
-   Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out,
for if you want the kernel you must break the shell.  And therefore,
if you want to discover nature’s nakedness, you must destroy its
symbols, and the farther you get in, the nearer you come to its
essence.  When you come to the One that gathers all things up
into itself, there your soul must stay.
-  Meister Eckhart

Nature teaches more than she preaches.
There are no sermons in stones.
It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
-   John Burroughs

Yun-yen replied, "Haven't you seen it?  In the Amitabha Sutra it says,
'Water, birds, tree groves, all without exception recite the Buddha's name,
recite the Dharma.'"
The part of the Amitabha Sutra quoted is where Shakyamuni's describes
the Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss, the Western Paradise. 
The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader, p. 119

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. 
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset.
- Crowfoot, Blackfoot Indian, 1890

I believe in the cosmos.  All of us are linked to the cosmos.  Look at 
the sun: If there is no sun, then we cannot exist.  So nature is my god.  
To me, nature is sacred;  trees are my temples and forests are 
my cathedrals.

-   Mikhail Gorbachev, 1990

For me the appropriate metaphor for the inner spiritual centre is a garden,
a place of potential peace and tranquility. This garden is a place where the
Spirit of God comes to make self-disclosure to share wisdom, to give affirmation
or rebuke, to provide encouragement, and to give direction and guidance. When
this garden is in proper order, it is a quiet place, and there is an absence of busyness,
of defiling noise, of confusion.  The inner garden is a delicate place, and if not properly
maintained it will be quickly overrun by intrusive under-growth. God does not often
walk in disordered gardens. And that is why inner gardens
that are ignored are said to be empty.
-   Gordon MacDonald, Cultivating Our Spiritual Garden

Every man of discernment, when walking upon the earth,
feeleth indeed abashed, inasmuch as he is fully aware that
the thing which is the source of his prosperity, his wealth,
his might, his exaltation, his advancement and power is,
as ordained by God, the very earth which is
trodden beneath the feet of all men.
-  A View on Ecology, Bahá'í Faith

Pan or Priapus was worshipped mainly in country
areas and especially at harvest time.  He was seen as
the protector of flocks and wild animals.  At the same
time he was noted for his wanton behavior
with human women and nymphs.
-   Priapus

Hail Mother, who art the earth,
Hallowed be thy soil, rock and flora
that nourish and support all life.
Blessed be thy wind that gives us breath
and thy waters that quench, bathe and refresh
all living things.
Holy Earth - as one - we praise your majesty,
grace and wonder.
-   Bill Faherty

Seasons and Time - Quotes for Gardeners

May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face.
And rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.
-   Irish Proverbs

Nature Mysticism

Our blessed Saviour chose the Garden for his Oratory, and dying,
for the place of his Sepulchre; and we do avouch for many weighty
causes, that there are none more fit to bury our dead in than in our
Gardens and Groves, where our Beds may be decked with verdant
and fragrant flowers, Trees and Perennial Plants, the most natural
and instructive Hieroglyphics of our expected Resurrection
and Immortality.
-   John Evelyn

There is religion in everything around us, a calm and holy religion in the
unbreathing things in Nature.  It is a meek and blessed influence, stealing
in as it were unaware upon the heart.  It comes quickly, and without excitement;
it has no terror, no gloom.  It does not rouse up the passions.  It is untrammeled
by creeds.  It is written on the arched sky.  It looks out from every star.   It is on
the sailing cloud and in the invisible wind.  It is among the hills and valleys of the earth
where the shrubless mountain-top pierces the thin atmosphere of eternal winter, or
where the mighty forest fluctuates before the strong wind, with its dark waves of
green foliage.  It is spread out like a legible language upon the broad face of an
unsleeping ocean.  It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within
us and which opens to our imagination of world of spiritual beauty and holiness.
-    John Ruskin

The great amorous sky curved over the earth,
and lay upon her as a pure lover.
The rain, the humid flux descending from heaven
for both man and animal, for both thick and strong,
germinated the wheat, swelled the furrows with fecund mud
and brought forth the buds in the orchards.
And it is I who empowered these moist espousals,
I, the great Aphrodite.
-   Aeschylus, The Danaides, circa 500 B.C.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples;
no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our
own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
-  Dalai Lama

If you want to find God,
hang out in the space
between your thoughts.
-Alan Cohen

Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the 
stream is a saving ordinance.  Communion service is at all 
hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and 
marrow of Mother Earth.
-   John Burroughs

    God, whose love and joy
                     are present everywhere,
can't come to visit you
                   unless you aren't there.
                                              -    Angelus Silesius (1624-1677)

The great need of our time is for people to be connected to spirit; 
for people to be connected to a core of feeling in themselves that 
makes their lives vital and full of meaning, that makes life a mystery 
evermore to be uncovered.
-   Harold Stone, Sandplay

"Live a good life.  If there are gods and they are just, they will not care
how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have
lived by.  If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship
them.  If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a
noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
-  Marcus Aurelius

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods
or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them
with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes,
cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous
senses could perceive.
-   William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell

The summer breeze was blowin' on your face
Within your violet you treasure your summery words
And as the shiver from my neck down to my spine
Ignited me in daylight and nature in the garden

And you went into a trance
Your childlike vision became so fine
And we heard the bells inside the church
We loved so much
And felt the presence of the youth of
Eternal summers in the garden
-   Van Morrison, Album: No Guru, No Method, No Teacher,
Song: In the Garden

Nature: The Unseen Intelligence which loved us into being,
and is disposing of us by the same token.
-   Elbert Hubbard

All the way to Heaven is Heaven.
-  St. Catherine of Siena

The Earth Is Our Mother

The Earth is our mother, we must take care of her
The Earth is our mother, we must take care of her.

Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.
Her sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take
Her sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take.

Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.

The Sky is our father, we must take care of him
The Sky is our father, we must take care of him

Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.

The Rivers are our sisters, we must take care of them
The Rivers are our sisters, we must take care of them.


Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.

The Trees are our brothers, we must take care of them
The Trees are our brothers, we must take care of them.

Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.

-  Hopi (Native American, Arizona) Chant

Pagan Chant Library

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having
to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
-   Douglas Adams

The point in life is to know what's enough--
why envy those otherwold immortals?
With the happiness held in one inch-square heart
you can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.
-   Gensei (1623-1668), Poem Without a Category
The Enlightened Heart, Edited by Stephen Mitchell, p. 86

Ideas About the Simple Life

"All the beings of the world pray,"  said my Grandad ... 
"Each living thing gives its life to the beauty of all life,
and that gift is its prayer."
-  Douglas Wood, Grandad's Prayers of the Earth.

Almost any garden, if you see it at just the right moment, 
can be confused with paradise.   
-   Henry Mitchell

Connection with gardens, even small ones, even potted plants,
can become windows to the inner life.  The simple act of
stopping and looking at the beauty around us can be prayer.
-   Patricia R. Barrett, The Sacred Garden, 2001

This meal is the labor of countless beings;
let us remember their toil.
-  Zen meal chant

Follow your bliss.  Find where it is 
and don't be afraid to follow it.
-   Joseph Campbell

We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature
and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water 
and the sea.  To say that divinity informs the world and all things is 
condemned as pantheism.  But pantheism is a misleading word. It 
suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but 
that is not the idea at all.  The idea is trans-theological.  It is of an 
indefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that 
is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being.

-   Joseph Campbell (1904-1987)

Sure Man was born to meditate on things,
And to contemplate the eternal springs
Of God and Nature, glory, bliss and pleasure:
That life and love might be his eternal treasure.
-   Thomas Traherne, Dumbness, 17th Century

The grove is the centre of their whole religion.
It is regarded as the cradle of the race and the dwelling-place
of the supreme god to whom all things are subject and obedient.
-Tacitus, Germania

Mother, Father, God, Goddess, Universal Power.  Remind us
daily of the sanctity of all life.  Touch our hearts with the
glorious oneness of all creation.  As we strive to respect all
the living beings on this planet.  Penetrate our souls with the
beauty of this earth, as we attune ourselves to the rhythm
and flow of the seasons.  Awaken our minds, with the
knowledge to achieve a world in perfect harmony.  Grant
us the wisdom to realize that we can have heaven on earth.
-   Jo Poore

The only way to know your true nature is through the actions you 
take in the real world, not through meditations or introspection.
- Doc Trejo

            Buddha's Nirvana,
        beyond flowers,
and money.
                                                   -    Issa, Translated by Lucien Stryk