Chanticleer, or Wonder at the Call of the Dawn

 Post 42

Is the wish to share wonder the first stirring of art?

To combine wildness and order, light and shade through love so that you can share the inklings and glimmers of infinity that fill you, and seem to overflow from you?

Welcome to Chanticleer.

Chanticleer  is an extraordinary pleasure garden on the Main Line.  Chanticleer is named after a rooster who shows up in Northern European folklore. a rooster like the one emblemed on top of this pool houses.

How do you communicate moments of wonder, when your senses seem to be taking in more than they can hold? Like at first light, when out of nowhere, emerges the rich complexity of reality.

Go to Chanticleer, walk around, maybe sit for a bit.

Such beautiful, expansive and witty public gardens, 'built solely for pleasure', are a blessing of this area. Within a few hours or less you can reach Chanticleer, Longwood Garden, Winterthur, Scott Arboretum , Morris Arboretum, Mt. Cuba , Wavehill, Brooklyn Botanical Gardens New York Botanical Garden and others. All of these are inspiration on many levels,

So, if you are lucky and willing, here are dawns, foretastes, or deep tastes, of what reality might be, or could be, or is, at sublime moments of joy and awe.

When everything mixes up at levels of complexity beyond human reason, but not beyond human experience, imagination and art.

Perhaps it is what Coleridge called Reason. Or not. Perhaps something else. But whatever it is, it includes the wonder that overflows and makes people make things.

... gardens, emblems of possibility, if you can just let its pleasures reach you. 

P.S. --Apologies for the pics, which do not do justice to this great garden. It was mid-day on a sunny day when I was there, and that is a hard time to get decent shots.

Thanksgiving

Post 16

Deerfield Village, MA

Now is the time for giving thanks. We are problem-solving, stimuli-hungry animals who lose track of the common and uncommon graces of our lives.

Somehow, for me, gardening slows down time. For after an hour or so of digging, smelling, placing, moving, something in me stills. Only then do I truly begin to feel, really feel, the sun massaging my shoulders or the fine texture of  grit on my fingers

It's easy to be so busy thinking/planning/solving that living, feeling unwanted, gets out of the way.

The word gratitude, comes from the Latin gratitudo and gratus. Which means thankful. It also means pleasing, as in pleasure...

Pleasure gets no respect. We suspect it because it can lead us astray. But it can also lead us right.

Part of adolescence is learning to extract pleasure from things we originally find repugnant. From booze to tobacco to movies without happy endings, we learn to overcome instinctive pleasure. How else can we be cool and grown-up? We learn to tolerate, even be proud of,  the deadening side effects of overiding our nature, and then wonder, years later, what's gone wrong.

Maturity, among so many other things, may be about shedding such roughshodding over pleasure.

Pleasure is easy.  It is everywhere. And much of it is innocent. It does not hurt you or anyone else. That is the pleasure to go for, to be grateful for.

According to the OED, the second meaning of gratitude is grace. Like the the grace of innocent pleasure, there for us when we want it.

So is the act of feeling pleasure, in an of itself, a type of gratitude? The answer seems both obvious and paradoxical.

The reason I've made a garden is because it gives me pleasure, a pleasure I learned about by experiencing other peoples' garden. I hope my garden passes on that pleasure. I hope this blog with its pictures does too. It is a way of saying thanks.