As I trim the ragged hellebores and search for the barrenwort (Epimedium), I find something I didn't expect. Something uninvited. A memory.
I try and make sense of the image: My father has my mother pinned to the floor; his hands around her throat. My mother gasps for air and struggles to break his grip. I run to my father and try and pull him off her, yelling, “No, Dad!”
Ah, there are the two barrenworts I planted last fall. They made it through the winter. I gave them plenty of cover, a thick blanket of straw, but worried they wouldn’t survive.
The image returns: My dad falls back on his haunches and buries his face in his hands. He sobs. My mother gulps a breath, scrambles to her feet and runs.
My conscious mind takes over and tries to make sense of this senseless image. Where does it come from? Why is it visiting me today? I call my mother and share these images with her, and she recounts the incident. All her details match mine. Then she says, “Thank you for saving my life.”
In the card catalogue of my mind, I must have filed that memory away for 56 years. Did the flow I feel in the garden today dislodge that memory?
When I wrote advertising copy for a living, I entered a state of creative flow. But it wasn’t automatic. It happened only after I crammed my subconscious with client research, sat in on focus groups, interviewed customers and stormed my little brains out. When I finally sat down to write, I could inhabit the world the client wanted to create for the customer. I would become untethered from time and lose myself.
I first experienced flow in art classes in college in the printmaking studio. The smell of India ink, the feel of wet paper, the image emerging as paper and plate rolled off the press. I wanted to live in that state of flow forever. Later, I knew how lucky I was to have a creative profession that conferred that state of flow.
Now I’m in the flow in the garden, where mind and body are one. I see, touch, and often taste many things. It’s the opposite of the way I lived as a child: on autopilot. I had little awareness of my surroundings or myself. I tried to rescue my mother and my younger siblings from my father’s drunken rages. The futility of it all overwhelmed me. I was no match for the disease that claimed him.
Maybe being a caregiver again has awakened this memory? I know I’m no match for dementia either.
The subconscious works in astonishing ways: it records, dislodges, re-orders, and bears witness. It flows through me. And like the air after a good thunderstorm – it also calms my trauma.
I sink my hands into the soil, draw in the smell of earth and turn my face to the sun. Blue sky greets me, and nothing can disturb me.
Learn how gardening heals trauma:
https://tinyurl.com/5n967wjc