Sadness: A Wall Between Two Gardens
The Great Sadness
Sadness is but a wall between two gardens. — Khalil Gibran
If you have ever found yourself in a place of great sadness, you will understand the meaning behind this saying.
It can feel impossible to climb the wall, pull the wall down or ever see beyond the wall. The wall feels insurmountable.
But the wall also reminds us that it is there as a barrier and that there is another side to the wall; that there is another experience awaiting us if we can only find a way to get through what we are undergoing.
We could pull the wall down, brick by brick and this could take some time. Sometimes sadness is so great upon us that the effort it takes to remove one block at a time only gradually reveals the expanse on the other side. At other times, we realize we can employ the help of others, and in this way, it is like finding a ladder we can lean on the wall and thus quickly climb over leaving our sadness behind.
Some walls are solid (made of bricks) and others are less robust made of wooden fence palings; or even flimsy and just made up of pieces of chicken wire held in place with iron stakes.
Whether we can see clearly through the fence or not, we see and experience all these different types of walls throughout our life. Some are more easy to navigate through than others.
There are usually two sorts of gardens that people plant — vegetable and flower gardens. We plant vegetable gardens for the sustenance of our physical body and flower gardens to sustain our soul. Both are beautiful, and we can arrange them in different ways. Sometimes a flower garden and vegetable garden are separated by a wall or some fencing. Flowers are commonly found around borders or planted up against walls.
Vegetables such as potatoes and carrots provide nourishing and hearty meals to sustain us through the winter. At these times sustenance can be more important than flowers and require us to dig deep and harvest so we can be fueled for energy to brace us through the cold and help us battle whatever we need to fight.
In spring we often welcome new growth and bulbs bursting through the ground. Our souls sing with joy and our heart swells at witnessing the colors and experiencing the vibrancy of life renewed. We feel and draw happiness deep down inside us, as we observe the face of a flower as it turns towards the sun; inhale the scent from myriads of bobbing heads; and watch butterflies and bees skipping between the flowers.
Oh, a garden, what a beautiful analogy for life, and a wall, what a lovely metaphor for grief and loss and so symbolic of how we may navigate great sadness.
As long as we see sadness as a wall we are reminded there is another side; we can find tools to help us scramble over faster, we can sometimes see through it, but if we can’t — we can dismantle it, or find a gate or ladder that will allow us to cross over.
Whether our vegetables and flowers are all mixed in a smorgasbord we can savor both physical and spiritually all the time, or they are divided into two separate sides by the wall — we know and can remember that our souls and our bodies both need nourishment to sustain ourselves completely.
Finally, whether we are in a time of winter or a season of spring, let us remember all seasons are finite, all come to a close, and another is soon ushered in as that is the march of life, one follows the other, and that is inevitable. Just as rainbows follow rain, and growth follows a time of fallow.
This time of sadness will also pass.
“A garden that never died eventually would weary. Robbed of springtime, unacquainted with the extraordinary perfume that rises from the soil after it’s had its rest, the garden that winter doesn’t visit is a dull place. The return every spring of earth’s first freshness would never be kept if not for the frosts and rot and ripe deaths of fall. So when I go out from the garden for the last time in autumn, I leave the gate open behind me”. -Michael Pollan
