Selected Excerpts from Author Adele Seronde’s Our Sacred Garden: The Living Earth ~ Awakening the Visionary in All of Us
A visit to the Chalice Well Garden in Glastonbury, England, decades ago, turned out to be the incentive for writing my book. This garden brings seekers from all over the world, who believe that Jesus came there to be taught the wisdom of the Druids. They were there to be blessed by the waters of the Chalice Well. I went to the wellhead by myself. In the silence and beauty, I was overwhelmed by a desire to dedicate my life to listening to the cries of our suffering Earth and offering whatever solace I could in the form of gardens. Each one has become part of Our Sacred Garden: The Living Earth. I believe that the planting of gardens, both in the soil and in the heart, is one deeply creative and healing action, which can enchant people of any culture, race, or belief. Indeed, the garden is a metaphor for healing both self and community. It is the exploration of the symbolic Sacred Garden; the original paradise of everyone’s dream; that place of lost myth and poetry, so needed today; a sanctuary of healing, color, and fragrances, of still and running waters; a source of fresh resolution in our hands and in ourselves by which we can transform the planet.
In retrospect, art and gardens and family have always been my life. Around me, I have always had the music, colors and fragrances of gardens. As a painter, shapes, lines and color are my language, weaving together a tapestry of living greens, flames, sapphires and prisms. Happiness, to me, is emerald and viridian; anger, a striated crimson; and inspiration, scarlet and gold. {Preface to Our Sacred Garden: The Living Earth, p.9}
After entering the garden and seeing the water flowing into a basin formed into the shape of the Vesica Pisces, one is drawn gradually to the well itself. {This symbol I learned, is considered to be part of sacred geometry, which incorporates the three sacred roots (v2, v3 and v 5) that may be as old as eternity.}
And there, by the Chalice Well, covered by a lid with the same sacred design, the Earth was actually trembling (probably from the rush of the subterranean waters). I, too, began to tremble and, for no describable reason, to weep.
It was as if all the anguish of the Earth reached up with the sorrow of a land whose spirits had fled, as if the weeping of the whole Earth entered my bones, and the tears were part of Christ. I sat on a nearby bench as alone in that somber, poignant garden as if I had been in Gethsemane. And, in the falling of my tears was a soul-cleansing energy, a catharsis—a purifying—as in part of a Navajo prayer chant:” With a place of great sorrow in me, I wander. In beauty, I wander.”
I was gradually overcome by a feeling of affirmation—an affirmation of my love for the land and the sky and the sea and all their creatures; of my creation of gardens wherever I have lived; of the continuity of the love for the Earth in my family, generations past, present and future. But more than that, it was a declaration of principle.
This was to be my mission: to encourage creation of new gardens of hope and healing, spiritual gardens anywhere and everywhere, and to find kindred souls fired by the same mission.
What might this Garden of the Chalice mean to all of us today? A symbol, a challenge, a precedent, a goal, a sanctuary? All of these? What if we were to bring back love into the dark and wasted places of the Earth, into the aquifers of our soul and of our minds, through co-creating Gardens of the Chalice throughout our Earth? What if small groups of us all over the world worked together with the living creatures, with Gaia herself?
What if we pooled our human resources—mental, spiritual, physical and material-and gave of our labor to create small oases of beauty to be loved and maintained? These could be gardens of healing dedicated to all those who suffer; to those who face challenges, and also to our children. Together, we could bring soul-nourishment into the Earth and the aquifers of our being and, in so doing, become healed. (Ch.5, p.63-64.)
About the Author:
Adele Seronde is a painter, poet and community activist. Born into a family of artists, Seronde lived and worked in Massachusetts and Maine, where she raised her five children. In 1982, her immediate family moved to Arizona, where some of her children, greats, and great-great grandchildren also live.
Seronde has exhibited for 60 years in Boston, and on the East coast, in Sedona and Phoenix, Arizona, and in Florence Italy. For 40 years, her work has been on display at the Wingspread Gallery in Northeast Harbor, Maine. She is represented in many private and public collections, and in the Phillips Museum in Washington. Adele Seronde has created or contributed to 6 books of poetry, and published Our Sacred Garden: the Living Earth in 2011, and is now working on another book, Pegasus, a Life-Force with Wings for Education.
As an activist, she was co-director of Visual Arts for Summerthing– Boston’s Neighborhood Art Program (which she helped design) from 1968-1971; President of the Christian Herter Center for Environmental Arts (located in the old Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Charles River) from 1973-1979. After Adele and her family moved west, Seronde co-founded and was president of a non-profit organization called, “Gardens for Humanity”, located in Sedona, Arizona. She is currently free to paint and is undertaking performance poetry while continuing her literary career.
Adele Seronde may be reached at: [email protected]
Facebook: www.facebook.com/adele.seronde?fref=ts
