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Optimism blossoms in gardeners’ view of life

Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2006

Alice Miller, a psychotherapist with a doctorate from the University of Maryland, has merged two paths in a just-published book, ‘‘To Everything There Is a Season,” the spiritual insights from her life experiences and the creation of a woodlands garden.

Living with a gardener myself, I know what Alice writes is true, that when gardeners walk the paths of their creations they pass ‘‘over a threshold and into a sacred space.” They seem to know every flower, every bush, every tree and their journeys.

And, a garden, as Alice demonstrates in her book, mirrors life — its losses, its growth, its changes — blooming where we are planted, and sometimes blooming where we least expect it.

She has planted in her pages quotations and poems that enrich the conversation she has with her readers, including one that reminds me of the season we are about to enter, which I label the ‘‘when-will-winter-end season.”

Even though the temperature recently broke 60 degrees, most of us are tempted with thoughts about how to escape to a place where the sun shines warmly or how to cope with cabin fever. And, we absolutely know that there is no way we will make it through February without some reminder of the harshness of this season.

But gardeners, they are a different sort. And rather than mull over the problem of winter, they now begin to flip ahead on the calendar to March and are actively making notes and sketches, doing what E.B. White described as ‘‘calmly planning the resurrection.”

Alice recalls her mother, even while facing the end of her life, ‘‘would sit with a clipboard during her last fall, oblivious to her own mortality” as she anticipated the coming spring.

One life experience Alice tackles in her book, which resonated with me, was the relationship with her father, which was difficult and did not end the way she had envisioned.

It reminded me of the estrangement from my own mother whose life possessed a certain kind of over-the-line craziness and neurosis seemingly void of love that ultimately led me to leave home. Her path was difficult from childhood and made more complicated when she became a widow with seven children. Her life ended, abruptly, and there was a certain dark irony when circumstances dictated that I was the only family member available to comfort her and hold her hand in those final days.

My siblings and most of the people who knew of our family rushed to eulogize my mother. I remained silent, wishing her no disrespect, but unable to sort out the anger from the laughter and the sacrifice from the craziness that was her life. Turns out, reconciliation is near impossible to achieve on short notice. It takes years.

Alice writes of her father that ‘‘as a little girl, I learned very quickly what many children before me have also had to learn ... the wrath of an angry father is a good thing to avoid. And, what better place to hide than the garden.”

A man who passed the pain of his own boyhood onto his family, he was an island that ‘‘could not even grasp his own loneliness,” writes Alice.

In his last years, Alice visited her father regularly but ‘‘because I had so frequently feared him as a child, I could not touch him as an adult. I know that he felt this distance.”

When Alice’s father became ill, she had planned to take his hand and ‘‘walk with him as far as I could go so that he would not die alone.”

But a shattered knee injury confined Alice to a wheelchair and when the call came that her father was slipping away she was unable to arrive in time to take his hand for that final trip.

Alice writes, ‘‘It was with great sadness that I said goodbye to my father. Not just for what was, but for what might have been. I can accept now that sometimes the wounded spirit does not heal. We do not always know who will fly — and who will break.”

In the end, those walks in the serenity of Alice’s gardens where she struggled with the conflicting feelings about her father and his death allowed her to say, ‘‘Pop, I forgive you. And I forgive myself for not being able to go beyond the hurt child within me to the broken child in you.”

From conflict and death to joy and birth, Alice’s garden has been there for her. And, as she observes in her final passage, ‘‘As the steward of my garden, I have nurtured it. And so, also, has the garden nurtured me.”

Now, she shares her garden with us.

Chuck Lyons is chief executive officer of The Gazette.