THE GARDEN OF BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS

By Alison Hammer Winans

Dedicated with love to Jeanne Ayesha Lauenborg who passed away Monday, June 18, 2007

There is a sanctuary where I go during guided meditations when the leader says, “Go to a place where you feel safe.” And sometimes I go there alone to seek replenishment and an escape our cramped lodgings. My inner landscape used to be an empty windswept plain, a clearing in the woods or an open sunny meadow. But ever since my recovery from cancer it is a lush garden, humming and pulsing, a magical garden redolent of northern California, Hawaii and England. I say this garden is paradise, not because lions are lying down with lambs, but because there are no mosquitoes, and the mugwort, orchids and primroses flourish in unison. It is everything I want it to be, all in one and one in all.

Today I want answers to eternal mysteries. This morning as I held Ayesha’s bony hand she said, “Ali, I need to…” She drifted off, then re-opened her eyes and tried again. “I want to establish reality. Am I here?”

“Yes, you’re here, my friend.”

“Am I in my body?”

“Yes, you’re in your body.” It is her body although skin stretches over her skull like the head of a drum and loose flesh on her limbs flaps like prayer flags.

“Am I dying from cancer?”

I faltered and then said simply, “Not yet.” But when does she stop living and start dying? Where is that line?

Now I lie on my bed, close my eyes and invite the image of my garden. So grateful to be lying down, I relax my muscles and pass into another reality between the two guardians, grandmother banyan trees, broad-leaved and entwined with medusa-like vines since a time unknown. Bird-of-paradise flowers and glossy red anthuriums stand strong. Under the canopy there is a flash of color, a parrot’s squawk, the constant whirring of cicadas, the moist earthy smell of frilly orange fungi. Every springy step releases the fragrances of pineapple weed and pennyroyal, fruity and medicinal. A tropical heady scent draws me deeper into my favorite arbor. Jacaranda trees are dripping with tubular blue flowers and tiger orchids growing from the bark, while trellises of white plumeria, jasmine and trumpet vine buzz with bees and provide a resting place for monarch butterflies lazily opening and closing their wings, intoxicated by the perfumes.

A ruby-throated humming bird chatters in a tree, then in a flash of iridescence flies a circle around me, and comes back to his branch. “Hummingbird, when do we stop living and start dying?” It seems like the right kind of question to ask the only bird that can fly backwards as well as forwards. He kisses a vermilion trumpet vine, comes back to hover close enough that I feel the fanning of tiny wings and then zooms through the gate between my eyebrows into my head. I am spinning out into the relative universe where life and death are the same, and my avian guide says, “It all depends from where you are looking and how fast you are moving.” I feel that something important just happened but am not sure what it is.

So I continue along the path, footsteps releasing the woodsy aroma of variegated and lemon thyme. Sunlight streams between the oak trees, squirrels are chasing, bush tits are twittering, and a choir of warblers and vireos sing anthems. I look carefully amongst the scattered acorn cups for signs of a fairy tea party. When I was little, I wanted to be a fairy, and here I recognize their presence as time seems to shimmer and a numinous stillness develops. I sit on a moist moss-covered rock beside a constant flowing spring that creates a magical pool filled with leaping frogs, water lilies, giant pink-yellow lotus blossoms and koi, white with orange spots and orange splashed with white. The spring burbles and the wind whispers through the leaves, “Ayesha.”

In front of my eyes a robust caterpillar appears, lime green with horns and eye-spots, hitching a ride on a spider web. Catching it on a leaf, I say, “Caterpillar, what is it like to die?”

“To me death is transformation. You have to let the structure disintegrate and the elements come together in another form.” My, this is a scholarly caterpillar. “Thank you,” I say putting it down carefully. But I still don’t know what death really feels like.

Going deeper, there is a tall privet hedge that walls off a secret garden. A squeaky wrought iron gate covered in cobwebs opens into an English rose garden with honeysuckle trellises. Around a central fountain are beds with a joyful profusion of forget-me-nots, snapdragons, marigolds, sweet peas, larkspur and delphinium, not in soldier-like rows but in nature’s ordered chaos. Every flower holds a memory for me. I carefully remove a few honeysuckle flowers and suck out the ambrosia. My tongue is alive with sweetness. A monarch butterfly alights on my arm. “I’m sorry if I’ve taken some of your food,” I say.

The butterfly dances around my head, then delicately sips from a flower and lands in the palm of my hand. I must be forgiven. “Butterfly, how do you fly so many miles without dying?”

My royal friend unfurls and curls its proboscis, like a woman fluttering her eyelashes, and says, “None of us could do it on our own. We stay together to uplift each other. Together we arrive at our destination, separate we would fail to reach the goal.”

“Thank you.” The butterfly joins its friends, while I continue walking between clumps of pale yellow primroses, breathing in deep the pungent aroma of grey-green mugwort leaves. A skinny brown rabbit with alert ears hops in front of me nibbling on parsley and sage. Her shiny brown eyes watch me as I say, “Rabbit, why do we suffer so much?” She comes close, her nose catching my tears as they fall and says, “I will show you.” She hops along the path slowly enough that I can follow her outside the privet hedge.

And then we are in a hot dry golden meadow where the lazuli buntings glean grain kernels and the crickets chirp and the violet-green swallows swoop down catching flies. There is a spinning wheel with a maiden singing, and this must be Ayesha in her youth, with a voluptuous figure, long red hair, clear grey eyes and a captivating smile. She appears not to notice me as she spins piles and piles of straw into gold. Understanding begins to dawn within me. She works harder and harder, until I see yards of a golden gossamer cloth emerging, sparkling with ethereal colors, finer than the morning mist. Ayesha stands, wrapping the cloth round and round her body, and she twirls and circles like a dervish, faster and faster until she dissolves into a column of golden light reaching to the sky and beyond. I still hear her sweet voice singing, “Shemaya, the light of the universe, shemaya,” and I feel the ecstasy of her smile in my heart.

Now I am ready to leave my sanctuary carrying the magical gifts of wisdom and beauty inside me. I feel renewed and, for now, at peace, knowing that next time I hold Ayesha’s hand I will imagine her clothed in gold, singing, twirling, smiling.