The heart section of the garden is a bit of a challenge for me. I find the emotions and activities here to be more personal and intimate than the ones in the body or mind sections for example. Maybe that is also why it took me almost two months to document this November 2024 drawing you see below:

As usual, drag the center vertical line left and right for a before and after view.

Rivers, Stars and Poppies

The garden expands from the center of the page where you can see a small cluster of horizontal pink pen strokes. They quickly get longer and interlace with green blades to form three separate streams that go off towards the right into the broader world.

The first stream flows down alongside the border with psyche. It is as if an invisible embankment kept the plants on track and prevented them from overflowing into the psyche section. The river then widens into a delta and leaves the drawing on the bottom right side.

A second vegetal stream forms towards the top as a small group of pink grass blades reaches for a more vertical adventure along the soul section. Up there, a less friendly atmosphere rarefies the pink grass until it disappears close to red and pink stars and triangles. These jagged objects appear out of thin air without an apparent connection to the plants. Positioned outside the center circle, they symbolize actions that I undertake or events that occur in the external world.

A third group of four or five flashy fuchsia grass blades shoots off horizontally from the center of the garden like darts towards the word “HEART” itself. They quickly encounter a cluster of small red dots that absorb them in their flight, acting like a shield protecting the heart from intrusions. The red dots however find a way to continue and they pass through the word HEART by squeezing themselves through the letters “A” and “R”, building a passage between the inside and the exterior of the garden where they morph in bigger red flowers like lilies on a patch of light green grass.

The Eye of the Needle

Describing this drawing and trying to make sense out of it is similar to an out-of-body experience during which I observe my creation as if it were the work of someone else. While I relate to it and recognize parts of myself in it, I also discover things that surprise me such as the flow of red dots that stops in the green patch because I cannot explain them without a serious effort of concentration and introspection.

The red dots can be understood as emotional energy that flows from my inner self towards the outside world where I expect it to cause and fuel actions. But like the camel that must go through the eye of a needle, they must first make their way through the very small opening in HEART, between A and R. Once on the outside, the dots progress on a small distance before resting on a patch of green grass where they remain as if exhausted by the effort they just made to get here instead of moving on into the bigger world. Why and what does it mean? I could not have said it on the day of the drawing but maybe I can try now.

I usually do not stop mid-movement and ground myself like the red poppies do. But the dots indicate that on that November day, while my heart generated enough sentiments and energy of love and hate to reach the outside, it was not enough to influence things out there. While the bottom stream of green and pink strands of grass flows outside the page to explore the world and the upper stream meets the red jagged forms in a somewhat menacing confrontation, the poppies take a few steps outside, stop and settle in a passive coexistence with the plants that are already there. They indicate that inaction is also an option, that bursts of inner energy do not result every time in an activity on the outside as I thought it would when starting my gardens.

While my initial thinking was that emotions and actions strongly influence each other in almost mechanical manner, I now also accept that sometimes the drawing shows a weaker relationship between cause, here the outflow of sentiments from the heart, and effect, here again a simple sign of restful existence with no further action.

Plant rules themselves

As I interpret the garden, the metaphor it embodies takes a life of its own. It grows the rules for how to read it. The interpretation I just made will guide the creation of my next gardens which will in turn feed the next interpretations. This exploration we are starting generates a spiraling movement that leads to deeper understanding of how I function in the world. As the garden begins to let my heart express itself through the drawing, my hand draws new plants that embody inner moods and emotions on the inside of the circle. They will interact, or not, with the tangible outside world. And my mind will again interpret what the heart expressed. It may be time to do a post on the mind next.