This photo shows the work of granite sculptor Jesús Moroles.  We are grateful for his permission to use this photograph. Also thanks to Boody Fine Arts.

If you’re thinking about building a meditation garden, then you’ve got a lot of thinking to do.  Some of that thinking  is even meditative, in the sense that you need to look into yourself and see what gives you peace.  It’s not the same for everyone, you know.  A lot of people must love wind chimes.  I don’t.  Oh, I don’t mind them if they’re at the other end of the yard and I can faintly hear them on a windy day.  That’s nice.  But for a calm, meditative place to have wind chimes, for me that’s a distraction.  And a distraction in a meditation garden soon becomes an irritant.

We like birds.  We love watching them and listening to them, so we encourage them.  Our yard is an official  “dedicated wildlife sanctuary” (pretty good for a tenth of an acre in the city), and we have lots of bird houses and bird bath and places for nesting and hiding.  We love birds.  Not everyone does.  A few years ago, a beloved cousin and her husband spent the night and we gave them the room off the garden, thinking that the morning bird noises would be a pleasant way to greet the day.  Instead, we heard “Boy, those birds could get irritating after a while”.   So not everyone finds the same things to be calming.

I can sit in our garden and let my eye fall from plant to plant, from micro to macro, and sit and drink my tea as I absorb the sounds and smells and sights of our sanctuary in the heart of this city.  Sherry can’t.   For Sherry, the work is the meditative part.   Never one for “navel gazing”, she walks through the garden, yes, admiring it, loving it, but also pulling the weed here and there, staking the falling stalk.  When we finish our evening “garden tour”, I’m refreshed, Sherry’s dirty.  And refreshed.  It’s who she is.

All that is a roundabout way of asking “What do you find calming?  What is meditative for you?  What gives you peace?”    In the next post, we’ll discuss some of the common things that find their way into meditation gardens, and how you don’t need even a tenth of an acre to have one.

Next Posting:  What Works Best in a Meditation Garden?

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