My grandfather asked me once when I was a young boy what I was doing sitting still in his living room. I told him I was thinking. His reaction was: “I could never do that, thinking without doing anything else”. He was a very driven person, always active and his comment stuck with me ever since. Does it explain why the Mind section of the garden might be the easiest for me to share? Because using the mind to try and understand how things work is just something I do and share, unlike the Heart section for example, which I consider to be more personal and private. Rightly or wrongly, I hold the mechanics of thinking to be commonly shared and universal. With that said, let’s explore how I’ve drawn the Mind section using this February garden.

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

Green Hole and Red Energy

Right in the middle of the inner garden, in the drawing’s center, grows a patch of light and dark green grasses. From it, red lines radiate outward in all directions, connecting to the ring of words: mind, soul, heart, psyche, body. The red lines form a spatial pattern that suggests a 3D surface—reminiscent of scientific illustrations of black holes, which depict gravitational fields. But here, it’s something gentler: more like a green fountain generating red energy than a dark void pulling in everything, even light.

The red lines are not all the same. Those extending toward the Soul appear different. They’re not as fluid; they curl inward. The word Soul seems to push them down again, back into the green patch at the garden’s center. The lines toward Psyche, by contrast, are more like those that connect to Mind, light, energetic with upward motion.

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A Blue Titan

Just underneath the green patch, in the inner area of the Body, a blue, three-pronged shape diverts the red lines away toward the Mind and Psyche areas, where they dissolve while still inside the inner circle just before reaching the words mind and psyche. The blue shape in the Body area probably comes from the Pilates session I attended before doing the drawing. It was an intense hour during which the instructor emphasized precise muscle movements in sync with our breathing.

The blue form itself resembles a figure lying face down, legs raised on the left, torso and head lifted on the right, pushing the red line back. It suggests that the Body is actively redirecting the Mind’s focus. Interestingly, blue Body elements actively occupy space in the Mind zone, pushing the red lines into the Psyche area and lifting the whole inner garden upward like a blue Atlas, the ancient Greek Titan who held up the sky.

The blue clouds extending toward Mind and Psyche seems to echo that sky as well as the lingering effect of the earlier breath control.

While the Mind dominates the inner zones of Soul and Psyche, leaving its imprint through red topological lines, as if marking its territory, it struggles around the Body while leaving the Heart untouched.

Outside, in the outer world of the garden, the dynamic flips and the elements of the Mind remain more clearly within the boundaries of their garden section.

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Clouds and Lightning

Along the outer edge of Mind, the drawing looks like a brewing storm. Jagged clouds emerge from the boundary with Soul, releasing lightning bolts made of red triangles spinning inwards, falling along a downward curve on the left side into the blue clouds of the Body that symbolize the exercise session I did earlier. The lightning bolts, representing external input and activities, never reach the inner Mind. Instead, they are blocked by the red doughnut shapes, which act like protective shields to repel the energy and prevent it from entering inside.

These small doughnuts, perhaps also fountains, serve as a strong boundary between the outside and the inside. They do not just block energy; they absorb and store it, possibly for later use. Though they remain in place, they are not passive. Nervous red strokes animate them, giving them a dual nature—still yet full of internal motion. It’s as if they are ready to release the energy they’ve captured from the sky above, where the Soul and Body meet.

In the external section of the Mind, the red energy is contained within its zone. The Mind seems to be restricted, enclosed by the surrounding elements. The blue cloud from the Body presses it inward, and the Soul offers no support. Instead of opening up, the Soul stays distant and offers passive resistance. It’s odd how emptiness and silence can act more like a barrier than a passage. Despite their inner movements and considerable energy, the elements in Mind cannot overflow into the Soul—they curve back on themselves instead of reaching out. In a more active strategy yet yielding the same barrier effect to prevent the Mind from entering it, the Body has formed protective blue clouds with green grass blades.

For now, the red clouds and bolts of lighting have no outlet. The energy is stuck, waiting for the right moment to either explode or be directed into something equally powerful, but more controlled.

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Drawing and Science

The degree of interaction plants and other elements show across all parts of a garden dedicated to the Mind section surprised me and inspires me to explore in a future post analogies with neurobiological models of the mind. The red lines for example can be seen as neural pathways or axons transmitting electrical impulses across different brain regions while avoiding others. And the central green patch can be understood like a model of the hippocampus acting as a central place of memory and conflict regulation used by all five regions. First however, I’ll write posts about the Body and Soul to wrap-up the series on the five sections.

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