Gardening is Ritual Whether Begun As Sacred or Profane

In the garden is the ritual of life.
.
How very satisfying, upon a winter's day, walking by a window, having put this garden, below, upon Earth.  A moment in perfect poetry answering why every galaxy, every star, every atom, every void was created, for this exact moment.
.
In the ritual, love.  A manner to 'take joy', whether joy is obviously present, or not.  Joy is always present.  In a garden how can you not get life's 'Take Joy' memo?


Pic, above, here.
.
"For Indigenous Australians, ritual sings the natural world into continued life, in a diffuse and enspirited relationship between the Dreamtime ‘past’ and the present. The Dreamtime surrounds the present, having created the landscape and order of the world, giving meaning and profundity to life and reflecting cosmic order, while rituals of the ‘ordinary’ present, in turn, sustain the ‘extraordinary’ Dreamtime order."
.
"In the dominant culture, ritual is often a stale, wilted word, as dusty and songless as Christmas decorations glimpsed in midsummer. Many people profess no clear religion and lack formal rites, and yet, even in ritual-poverty, a yearning persists to rekindle it from a stub of a candle, a petal and a word. There is a perceptible need for that numinous Other Place to which ritual gives passport – where no one is exiled and none a foreigner, and there is a defiant fecundity in contemporary ways of answering that need to give wishes wings."
.
" The poiesisor making of beauty, not the possessing of it, is the kind associated with art or poetry.  Meanwhile, the effect of making beauty, a Balinese taxi driver told me, is that ‘your mind is surprised and happy. Beauty makes you feel pure, and purity is necessary for prayer.’ " 
.
"In the canang saris, flowers are the symbol of beauty, and flowers attend rituals all over the world: flowers for birth and death, the doorways of life, flowers for social doorways, for guests and hosts, flowers to honour and to thank with the lightest touch – a petal-weight of unimpeachable beauty. You don’t have to believe in god to believe in the radiant divinity of flowers and their beneficent efficacy."
.
" Flowering plants are quite literally a source of life; according to the botanist Walter Judd at the University of Florida: ‘If it weren’t for flowering plants, we humans wouldn’t be here.’ They are necessary, but they also illustrate the margins of grace beyond necessity – a rhapsody of colour where life sings: such is the veridical beauty of flowers. In terms of evolutionary aesthetics, the beauty of flowers is primal – they have sung a soft serenade for 130 million years, and their beauty was there before we humans were there to see it. And perhaps after."
.
"The sweet paradox of small daily rituals is that the ordinary is intensified into the sacred through the numinousness of the absolutely commonplace, an illustration of immanent divinity, demonstrating that all it takes to find cascades of enchantment is a tender attention in which the natural living world is blessed by the psyche, and the psyche by the natural world. Ritual sculpts, shapes and polishes the spirit in a fineness of mind, the hearth of the heart tended and made more tender by the delicate touch of something little more than a thank you. So the slightest of ritual magic, turning on a breath, might open doorways on to a future; and life might be protected by a petal and the holiness of prayers."  All quotes, above, by   Jay Griffiths , award-winning author and contributor to The Guardian and Orion magazine.  She lives in Wales.  
.
In my garden, living with my garden around the house, and in my heart, became, along the way, love, grace, joy, and ritual for surviving on this Earth.
.
Take Joy, indeed.  
.
Garden & Be Well,   XO T
.
Full article with the quotes, above, Aeon.