garden awakening

Mary Reynolds (The Garden Awakening)

Last year, around this time, I was getting ready to start the Ogi apprentship in Nurney Farm, in Carbury (co. Kildare). During the botanical art exhibition in Claregalway in June I bought the Garden Awakening and I couldn’t stop reading it.
Martin and I started to dream about our future project, based on Forest Gardening and Natural buildings… but this book definitely inspired us more than ever.

The Garden awakening is a well described book about the perception of nature we can discover in Ireland, if we walk in the forests, if we start to listen to the sound of the birds and the crackling of the trees… there is a whole world of mystery in this land that always fascinate me.

This is what I wrote in my own blogpost when I was reading the book:

“I took The Garden Awakening with me, an amazing book that came to my sight at the Bookshop in Claregaway Castle. I had my four paintings exhibited together with other amazing artists, and after the opening i went to the tiny bookshop at the castle and i got this amazing book by Mary Reynolds.
I walked 2 hours, stopping at a lawn to read my book. I walked all the way on my shoes, but from time to time i was taking them off walking bare feet on the fresh cut grass of some countryside houses. If you take off your shoes while walking you can feel some energy below. That may help you to feel better.
I don’t now where i got all that energy but it was a magic evening. I just wanted to prove to myself that walking is real happiness.
There was nothing else than a straight road, fields with cows and nice houses on the side. Nobody was walking, few cars were driving.
When i arrived to the bike i decided to go to another village, 20 minutes cycling to go, around 8km and I went to get some food. On the way back it was getting late, I couldn’t stop cycling, the smell of the fields and wild flowers were giving me the strenght to keep going and it felt like i could hear the Hearth breathing, as if the soil was giving his last breath out before recharging again in the night time.
Nature teach us to take big breaths, slowly walk into things without rushing.

“We are inundated by the mainstream media with all the things we “must have”, “must do” and “must be”, including paying obsessive attention to out bodies and physical fitness, to achieve our statusas fully functioning members of a productive society.
…
Walking, especially ambling, restores balance. The benefits of walking are not about quantity, but about the quality of contact, the opening up of our natural senses, so often stifled by the digital age. It’s about being alive to the moment without the obstruction of a health-and-safety notice, and about a return to our natural pace and rhythm”

Jane MacNamee (from Resurgence & Ecologist)”

Reading the Garden Awakening gave me hope, the strength to dream big and build your own life at the same pase with Nature.