Gardens in the Deep Woods

One of these bright, soft fall mornings, if you walk down the dirt road along the orchard, and take the turn where it bends out of sight in the haze…

There are still brittle green leaves on the trees and the ground is covered with the same brittle green leaves.  There is that smell in the air.  You will walk briskly but with pleasure, alongside the orchards and the ditches and the pastures and the little woods.

Eventually you will realize that you no longer recognize the trees and the roads.  You will be beyond the fields you know.

You may find a garden in the woods, a little gated garden with fountain and benches and ornamental trees.  It will be more beautiful than any garden you have ever known.  It will have been designed to be perfect to the human mind.  You will linger there a long time, when you leave you will discover that the sun is low in the evening sky, and when you come back to the roads you know you will still have a glow.

You may find another garden in the woods.  It will have no gate.  There will be a border but you would be hard pressed to say of what the border consisted or where exactly the border lay.  The garden will not fit you.  It will be the perfect garden, but designed for other than human eyes.  The colors imply a symmetry on different wavelengths than the ones you see.  There is a different logic at work than the ones your mind can produce.  It will seem like a moment to you, standing there, gaping at the otherness of it.  But when you turn again to leave, the sun will be low in the evening sky.  Elf-struck, they will say, those who see you when you return.  It will be something in your eyes.

Or you may wander further to where the woods start to rise in little foothills and you can sense the outlines of a mountain range you’ve never known before beyond the hills in the mist.  You may come to another garden then.  It will be plants, stones, water . . . but it will freeze you with its eeriness.  You will stand there unable to move, unable to understand.  After long unthought moments, it will come to you.  Some bare glimpse of what the garden is.  You will see that the garden was designed not for a point of view of a creature other than human.  But that the garden was designed to be seen from every point of view at once.  You will just for a bare instant glimpse the garden as it was meant to be seen and the glimpse will break you.  You will flee the garden with your mind burning in pain.  When they find you wandering, they will tell you that you have been gone for months.  God send that you recover.

There is another garden on the mountain.  It was meant to be seen not only from all points of view at once, but also from each and every individual point of view.  You will not come upon it this fall.  It is the Last Journey.