Rocks

I’m writing this ahead to time as I’ve got a very busy end of week coming up.

The last few days have been filled with anxiety. Why did I ever decide to leave that safe glass bowl!! It has its origins in various family and health issues so its been appropriate, just excessive to experience. It’s a horrible experience to go through the day totally cast down by life, full of dread and with hostile feelings to the outside world. I’m noting all this just to also note that it comes and goes in phases and what helps.

Firstly exercise: yes doing circuit sprints definitely eases it, burning off some of that excess fight or flight adrenaline.

Secondly: we visited an old friend who has created a magical garden in a Japanese style. He is by career a scientist but has a huge hobby in rocks. Walking around his garden again (we first saw it 20 years ago) I felt like my chest was breaking open with the beauty of it. You wind through the garden from hidden area to hidden area. There is a beautiful waterfall (all man made) and a rock archway / tunnel that you only get through in single file and come out into another area of a pond and plants.

I came home on a real high. I knew I loved his garden but forget the sheer joy of it until I’m in it.

In the past he has helped us do our garden (on a much more minor scale) and as we drove home we discussed the possibility of doing something again with him. I think we would both be up for it if he was. He’s an old man now, maybe past doing it, but it would be fun…

I wish I’d taken some photos while I was there but it just never occurred to me. He is a man of huge artistic sensitivity which has taken its outlet in the form of working with rocks, it is so….random.

A few days later I am still quite high from our garden encounter. It has made me really keen to get back into the garden and work in it. Before you get any illusions, I am hopelessly lazy when it comes to weeding, general maintenance, planting etc, etc but I do have one skill, shaping plants so they look beautiful in conjunction with the rocks. In the last two years I have deliberately stayed away from the garden to focus all my creative energy on my zines but now I feel very open to getting back out there.

In fact this morning I ran out and worked on that beautiful wisteria I posted an image of a few weeks ago. The flowers had gone over and it was too heavy / full /clotted. Now the structure, form and shape of the branches are on view. (The photo is from the opposite side as you can’t see it from the other angle)

Update:

I survived all the events of last week and with a good outcome, will blog about it in due course.