Garden

The garden is the self you have cultivated. The Persian paradise (pairidaeza) gives us the very word — a walled garden, sufficient unto itself. Christian tradition opens in one garden and closes in another. Sufi poetry uses the garden as a repeated image of the heart in bloom. Jung treated garden dreams as maps of the psyche’s current state: what is flourishing, what is overgrown, what has been neglected. The condition of the dream-garden matters. An abundant garden signals a flourishing inner life; an overgrown one, neglect; a garden behind a locked gate, a self you have cut off from yourself.