IV – The Emperor

So, maybe I’ve let myself go a little. I mean, a lush garden is wonderful, and I love all greenery, but the weeds are all mixed in with the plants, and it’s getting a little unmanageable. Yes, I said it, weeds. Yes, I know I always said there wasn’t such a thing. I know I said all plants were valuable, and that there were no weeds, only wildflowers. But I can kind of see your point — maybe there are some plants that want to strangle the life out of others, and it’s getting a little unbalanced with all these super-dominant plants. Maybe some kind of order would be good.

There’s also the matter of the animals. I love the deer and the rabbits, but they keep eating the plants and defecating all over. So, that’s the first step. I need to build a fence. It pains me to cut down the trees: I hear their screams as my blade whacks into their skin. But I need wood for the wall, and there isn’t enough loose wood around. It needs to be tall enough that the deer can’t jump over. After I cut the trees, I make the wood into boards and construct the fence. Obviously, I need a gate; I don’t want to imprison myself here.

When the fence surrounds the garden, and a gate allows entrance and exit, I know I need to turn my attention to the plants. I’ve been avoiding this. It was once my nature to just want to nourish them all, to just let them grow wild. But now, things have changed. It is overgrown and unruly, from my lack of discipline. While it hurt to cut down the trees, it feels just as wrong, at first, to want to shape these plants into my own image. But once I get started, I begin to find the ways to tame the wildness without oppression. And always I am rewarded, not just by the beauty of the sculpted shapes, but also by the sudden exuberance expressed by the plants. It’s as though they have been waiting for this, for someone to give them shape, purpose, structure.

Maybe they didn’t want to run wild.

When I am done, I have neatly trimmed hedges in exact geometric patterns. I have bursts of color in just the right place. Complimentary colors balancing each other: blue and orange, purple and yellow, and here and there bright red blooms against the dark green leaves. There are paths for walking and fountains for melody and stone benches for resting. Fragrant flowers are far from each other so the different smells don’t intermingle or overpower. Everything has a purpose and reason, and it is beautiful in its symmetry and order. And far from stifling growth through unnatural oppression, this new order has made the garden flourish in a different way than it did before. So, welcome to my garden. May it bring you peace and calm, and a sense of balance and rightness with the world. All is as it should be.

The End.

III – The Empress

The cold wetness of a tongue awakens me. The dog is jumping up and down, but all I see is barren land. Just dirt. Within myself, I know instinctively that this land isn’t sterile, just dormant with potential. Someone or something has stomped out all the dreams and just abandoned it. I stand up, seeing myself clothed in a skirt of green leaves, and a top made of red flower petals, the only spot of brightness here. But I am sad; I don’t belong in this place that is so dead.

I walk around the dirt in the pale morning light of dawn. There is nothing for miles and miles.

Even the air smells like dust.

I am tempted to walk away. To find my real home, because this is not it. I belong with lush greenery and humming insects, not this dead land of nothingness. But even as I turn to go, I can’t. I can feel the pull of the land, the potential it still holds. Knowing that it has been abandoned again and again means that I can’t abandon it now. Not even for my true home.

I hunch over and cry.

I cry for all the lost children, all the abandoned pets, all the gardens gone to fallow. I cry for those who’ve lost those things, too: the parents standing at too-small graves, the little boy crying out the window for his cat, the woman in the nursing home watering a single plant every day with the same attention she once paid to a huge vegetable garden.

As I cry, I notice something. Under my hand, where the tears fall, a small sprout has timidly peeked its head up. Maybe that’s all this place needs: someone to care.

I care.

I feel the watery pools behind my eyes as I take in the world’s sorrow.

I just let it all rain out of me. Rain, rain, rain nourishing the land.

In no time, this once barren place has become home, my real home.

The dog yips and dances around, then disappears into the undergrowth. I am alone now, but no, never alone.

My tears dry and my face lights up in joy, as I once more stand straight and tall. I smile at a bud of an iris, and it slowly blooms, proudly presenting its golden beard against its deep purple petals.

I whistle to a bee, and it begins to dance. As I watch and continue to whistle, hundreds of bees join the first and follow a choreography brilliant enough to dazzle the world’s most prestigious ballet company. I sit on a stump and a shy rabbit hops up to my feet, then settles in my lap. A butterfly flutters over and kisses my nose, then kisses several of the most upstanding gentlemen flowers, then flies off again, coquette that she is.

All this land needed was compassion and tears and feeling. A mother. I have come home again.

The End.

II – The Priestess

As the sky turns golden, then crimson, then turquoise, the crescent moon appears in the western sky. A silver trail, too bright to have come from the moon, sparkles off in the distance. A howl rises in the night. Somehow, I know it is still the same dog I’ve been following, now enchanted by the moon. What mystery is this? I need to know, and something in me knows I just need to listen.

Crickets, owls, the rustling of leaves, distant yips and howls from wolves or coyotes accompany me down the silver path. These sounds are the expected music of nighttime in the woods. But as I walk the trail, I hear a chant. Dissonant and ethereal, it grows louder the further along the path I go.

Eventually, I arrive at a cave. A small stream flows out of it, back down the mountain, growing from a slender tendril of water into a raging river. A sense of the tides and waves rising and falling in my blood awakens me to the ancient primordial flow of river to sea to clouds to rain to streams to river . . . One of the Mysteries I needed to learn — but the longing still drives me forward along the silver path, right into the large opening of the cave.

No, not a cave. A cathedral. The walls rise high, to a point, with elaborate stalagmites and stalactites reaching toward each other, the sacred pillars of the Earth. Water drips, and the sound echoes off the earthen walls, giving percussion to the chant, which continues to grow while the other sounds of the night are hushed, smothered by the darkness. And I too am smothered, devoured.

In the center of this cavern is a small pond, the source of the stream. An opalescent stone seat faces me from across the pond, drawing me forward. As I approach, the mournful melody surrounds me.

It is too much; I fall onto the stone, the song infusing me, somehow nowhere and everywhere. Trapped, and yet longing, I begin to sing, my voice creating a descant harmony rising above and below the melody of the stone. My vision blurs; I no longer see the cave, but something beyond. Shapes form in the water of the pond as the light of the moon dances across the surface. A blue ball becomes green, gardens grow, my mother smiles as she stirs soup, the spotted dog leaps from the cliff — I see everything up to this point, and then the dog again, now in a lush green garden, jumping and bouncing at the skirt of a golden-haired goddess clothed in red.

I am leaning too close to the pond. As I fall in, the world dissolves, and I know where I am going. I have been granted a Mystery of the future: the Garden of Life.

The End.