What is the best way to describe one’s soul?

If soul isn’t the correct word, than perhaps essence, aura, or spirit are more appropriate?  Maybe the right word is consciousness?  Regardless of the choice of nomenclature, this discussion involves that intangible element that makes human beings sweepingly unique, and which also allows us to be differentiated from water-based, fleshy, automatons.

I like to imagine this “soul” as a garden.  There are many different kinds, in various states of flourish, size, and content.  Also, how this garden is looks is directly relatable to its care and location.

There is the simple garden on the windowsill.  Though the space is limited,  a few clay pots, herbs, and tender care can produce a minimalist garden.

Hydroponic gardens are fluid and produce plants and vegetation without soil.  The plants are given precisely the nutrients needed.  No growing medium is involved allowing plants to grow quickly and with great strength.

There are vast rose gardens.  These have helping hands sculpting their magnificence day and night.  They receive the best nutrients, fertilizers, and pruning.  They are protected from severe temperature, fluctuations and harsh weather.  They are admired by many.

Backyard vegetable gardens also exist.  Not only does the care and attendance produce healthy and productive plants, but these plants provide sustenance to its caretaker.

Gardens full of flowers also exist.  They radiate innumerable colors and indescribable smells.  They are meticulously maintained with regular watering, weeding, pruning and trimming.  Delicate, beautiful, and fragrant, they are pleasing to the owner and observer.

Japanese rock gardens surely also count.  Placid and calm, steadfast and consistent, they require little maintenance and no nutrients.  They require no sunlight, no water, and truly, only a simple rake and stir once in a great while is needed for this garden.

There are gardens forgotten.  They occupy a once, adequately defined space, and have traces of nutrient rich dirt at the base of the vegetation.  But the care has long been abandoned, weeds have run amok, and brambles and thorns bristle throughout.

Don’t forget about the occlusive gardens.  These appear normal from casual view, be it a healthy looking vegetable garden, or a distracting flower garden.  When the stalk and flora are parted, this garden harbors pit of snakes full ready to strike upon its disturber.

There are fledgling gardens, rich cocoa brown soil delicately pierced by sprouts yearning to reach, expand, and soak in the sun.

There are dying gardens, weeds not quite taking over,  with yellow withering leaves, leaning stalks, and extremities failing to bear fruit or flower.

There are artificial gardens.  They soak in the lights of bluish-purple spectrums, and are hidden in darkened rooms with plastic sheeting and shrouded in secrecy.

There are gardens of folly where one haphazardly attempts to grow many different plants concurrently.  All of the plants in the garden vying for the available nutrients.  Not all will survive.

There is also my garden.

I will not tell you where it is.  I will not give direction.  I will not point the way.

I will enigmatically gesture towards a house built from stone, quarried of flippant dreams, and bolstered by framing of wanton hope oak.  From there, down a long hallway, adorned by a plaque etched simply with the words, “Turn Back,” there is a door opening inwards.   Pressing forward through the doorway, a stale must wafts upwards.  The stone steps spiral counterclockwise, ending with hard packed earth, a late fallish chill in the air, and a room no larger than an above averaged sized garden.

“Watch your step!”

Be sure your footwear is formidable.  Shattered slivers of once heated sand are strewn about the room. Step gingerly, and approach the six-sided box in the center.  The dark black earth filling the container harbors the potential of its contents.   Several crystalline protrusions stand rigid in the black earth, defying the shattered remains of failed gestations.  Scattered upon the floor are shards of searching, yearning, trust, belief, sincerety, altruism, love.  All of these pursuits have failed. All have become nothing.   All have shattered in delicate and beautifully fragile shards.  All were once seeds in my…..

Garden of Glass

Humbly yours,

J