“Your mind is a garden. Your thoughts are the seeds. You can grow flowers or you can grow weeds.”
– Unknown
“As a woman, I see myself as a garden, and I see myself as the gardener of myself… We were not meant to save the world; we were meant to save ourselves! And in saving ourselves, we have saved worlds innumerable.”
– C. JoyBell
“The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant described how we love flowers “freely and on their own account.” Kant used flowers to illustrate his concept of “free” beauty, that is a form of beauty which we respond to regardless of utility or cultural value. Certainly, we know beauty when we see it. We recognize it as if something in us has been lying in wait for it. Beauty holds our gaze and saturates our awareness. Somehow the boundary between our self and the world shifts and we feel more alive in the moment of flourishing that it offers. Although the experience may be fleeting, beauty leaves a trace in the mind that survives its passing.”
― Sue Stuart-Smith, The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature
“What is the secret of beauty’s hold on us? Intuition suggests that it may be linked to our capacity to experience love, and research indicates that this is indeed the case.”
― Sue Stuart-Smith, The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature
“If there were no loss in the world, we would lack the motivation to create. As the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal wrote: “It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we ourselves in helpless despair—it is then that we must recreate our world anew, reassemble the pieces, infuse life into dead fragments, recreate life.” Gardening is about setting life in motion, and seeds, like dead fragments, help us re-create the world anew.”
― Sue Stuart-Smith, The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature
“I am in the kind of company that allows me to be alone and enter my own world. Both daydreaming and playing are increasingly recognized to contribute to psychological health and these benefits do not stop with the end of childhood.”
― Sue Stuart-Smith, The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature
ThingFinder 