A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all else it teaches entire trust. - Gertrude Jekyll
While in Jozi earlier this week I took out some time from the rat race I immediately found myself in and walked around Emmarentia Dam and the adjoining botanic gardens.
I've been coming to this garden for inspiration and solace since 1981, also to shed buckets of tears, to make my important decisions - about work, debt, money owed, relationships and those I've allowed to break my heart.
There I've walked many kilometres just out from under the shadow of the two phallic towers - Hillbrow and Brixton - that citydwellers hardly notice on the Johannesburg skyline, but I'm sure have played prominent roles, unconsciously or not, in many lives. At one time they used to inspire me, for all the wrong reasons; I used to wait anxiously for them to prick and puncture the skyline of the great city as I robotically travelled towards it from wherever I was: erotic semi-naked beach holidays on any of the coastlines, a pent up cricket ball of testosterone returning from weeks away in the army, back from university in Grahamstown.
At Emmarentia I've walked into reality the wispy, candyfloss fabric of my dreams - first those related to my life in a city I loved and that inspired me, then related to a life outside and away from the city, where I find myself now.
At Emmarentia I was never alone: here, along the many paths and parts of the massive garden (one for every mood, from sexual to holy) I developed my relationship with God. There I moved from a one-sided space of begging, cajoling, bargaining to an enlightened space of love on the top of the montain at the horizon's very edge, visible even from the gutters I constantly slid back into. Above all else it provided me with silence and solitude, the essential foundation of everything, and the invisible step ladder out of the gutter and away from the abyss.
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