I’m on my own today.
Maggie moved out of her room at WCU last week with Austin’s help. Today Mae moves out at UNCA. She’s allowed to bring one other person to assist her, and she has a three-hour window to pack up and move out. When she came home for spring break, she didn’t know that she would not be going back, per COVID19.
So, Reba and I headed up to work with the garden. John visited early in the day and commented on the frequency of my days in the garden lately.
“I’ve got a lot of time on my hands,” I replied. It’s a Thursday.
My wholesale business is “on hold” indefinitely. The venues to which I sell are all closed, deemed not essential. Suddenly I’m without income, and I’m left with questions about whether my work is “essential.” I always thought it was, believing that art elevates the soul, and that jewelry is an intimate art form in that it’s wearable and wrought with meaning for the wearer. Are those truths still true?
I’m ready for more stone work. But I decide to spend some time weeding in other areas to broaden my scope. I need time to think things through, when it comes to rocks, that is.
I have learned to think of the rock and the earth as concave and convex mirrors. And I’ve learned that soft red clay, which I often reach when I dig deep enough, is the perfect under layer for a stone that’s going to be walked on. I started out with slim stones, much wider than they are deep from the flat side. Turns out a stone with a flat side and a little more depth is much more ideal, more stable.
Digging deeper is causing some issues, bringing up stuff that I hadn’t planned to deal with. (Ha! Isn’t that how it goes. Should I start a list of garden metaphors for the contemplative life?) I have surplus red clay, and I have no idea what to do with it.
Until… I’m weeding on the east side when I notice a little tucked down area behind the main planting bed, just to the left of the arbor. I’m intrigued.
It would be an ideal place for meditation. There’s already what seems like a foot stone and a break in the stone wall. So, I set more stones to build a small retaining wall on the back side of the planting bed. And I kept weeding. Stoning. Weeding. And so on. And so forth.
The soil in the meditation space is rich. It’s on the downward slope from the entire garden, which years ago was graded and built up with fresh topsoil, and seeded as a lawn. There’s not much lawn left per se, but that topsoil is still there, much of it washed downhill from the main courtyard.
So, I’m thinking the thing to do is to 1) remove the topsoil from the meditation space and move it to the forthcoming center bed around the sculpture, 2) use the excess clay from the walkway to build up (level, with slight grade for drainage) the meditation space with a small retaining wall on the downside with the new fence line, and a stoned surface. That’s the order of operations as I understand it for now.
That, plus the plan to keep showing up to see what this garden has to teach me.
Jimmy Allen
Ginger Allen