The Serene Footsteps of the Year

One of my personal goals in life is to slow down enough so that I can truly see what is going on around me. I want to do this so that I can watch the natural world's journey on this remarkable piece of land where I live with my husband, son, dog and cat.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt more at ease, more at peace, more alive outdoors than in. I know this is why I garden because I don't care what kind of snake oil anyone is trying to sell you, the only way to garden is at the speed of a biological organism.

Slow and observant.

I'm attracted to novels that do this, that keenly observe humankind. It's why I love Edith Wharton and E.M Forster and E.E. Milne and Alexander McCall Smith and others like them. They know it takes time to get to know people.

My favorite non-fiction writers are the ones who take me deeper into Lady Nature's domain and Henry Beston is, in my opinion, one of the very, very best at this. His Outermost House brought tears to my eyes the first time I read it because he saw, so very clearly, what damage we were doing to Gaia back then. He also was a witness to the power and beauty of the sea in a way that I've never read anywhere else. Barbara Kingsolver exerts this same power in her book of essays, High Tide in Tucson. Craig Childs does the same in The Secret Knowledge of Water and William Least Heat Moon in PrairyErth.

So imagine my delight when I found a copy of a new-to-me book by Henry Beston, Herbs and the Earth, at the Five Colleges Book Sale in April. This edition was published by a renowned book publisher, David Godine of Jaffrey, New Hampshire with exquisite woodcuts by John Howard Benson so it is truly a gem.

I've done some research on Beston and discovered he was married to one of my favorite children's authors, Elizabeth Coatsworth, that he was born in 1888 and died the year I graduated from high school, 1968. AND that he wrote two books of fairytales that I've got to go find.

This is an excerpt from the opening chapter of Herbs and the Earth for you to enjoy on this fine Monday:

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A garden is the mirror of a mind. It is a place of life, a mystery of green moving to the pulse of the year, and pressing on and pausing the while to its own inherent rhythms. In making a garden there is something to be sought, and something to be found. To be sought is a sense of the lovely and assured, of garden permanence and order, of human association and human meaning; to be found is beauty and that unfolding content and occupation which is one of the lamps of peace.

…The gardening ancients were wise. Flowers for them were but an aspect, an incidental loveliness of something near to man, living and green. Plants were identities, presences to be lived with, known, and watched growing; they were shapes and habits of leaves, powers, fragrances, and life-familiars. A sense of form gave the garden its tranquility, and one might hear there, in the full of one's own peace, the serene footsteps of the year.