Gardener

The down to earth but wise aspect of self; the wisdom or insights gathered through life experience, from which we can direct our own growth and life to integrate the many parts of our nature. What are you growing or neglecting of your thinking, creative ideas, talents, and potentials. It can sometimes indicate a teacher or minister.

If you are a gardener it may also signify the many things you have perhaps unconsciously witnessed and learnt about the processes of growing, flowering, producing seed and life and death. You may also have learnt about your relationship with the earth and what it holds, also the feeling of satisfaction that comes from transforming an area of land and yourself. What grows can indicate the wealth or poverty of what you are harvesting in your life. Have you cleaned the rubbish, removed what is rotting, cared for seedlings?

If you are a keen gardener and see clay as a poor soil to grow things in, the clay can suggest difficult terrain or difficulty in changing yourself.

The process in each of us – the Christ – that synthesises our life experience, and considers what love, what resonance with all life there is in it. See: Compensation Theory; digging; garden.

Example: I look up and see her get up from a bench and walk away. I feel that I will never get her back. Then I am in a garden area at the side of the church, there is a young boy in a small green house and an old gardener and his wife. One of them comments on how the boy keeps mucking things up, thinks he knows what he’s doing but doesn’t. Then a woman like one of the old film stars like Jayne Mansfield sits on a bench that is in front of me at eye level and I find myself trying to look at her crotch as she cross’s and uncrosses her legs.

Example: I dreamt I was on a garden with an old man, a young boy and a young man in his thirties. The plot of land had something of the feeling of an allotment. It was well tended, and I had the sense the young man had been doing most of the work on it. The soil was rich but at the moment dry. A few shoots were just breaking the ground from hundreds of bulbs which had just started shooting.

The old man was kneeling at the edge of one end of the oblong plot of land. He was digging up bulbs one at a time and looking at them, then putting them back in the soil again. As the soil was dry he had to dig the hole a bit bigger to get them back. The bulbs had good roots and the shoots were firm. I was agitated about the old man digging them up though, and felt he should let them be. This seemed to link with my own propensity to dig up seeds when I was younger, to see if they had germinated.

The young boy was simply watching and was quite shadowy. The younger man was getting on with whatever work he was doing. I spoke to him after leaving the old man. Henry G.

Henry, the dreamer is a man in his late fifties. He explored his dream and summarised what he realised as follows: In connecting with the feelings in the dream the different aged males are all facets of myself. The old man is my own sense of ageing, and the feeling of dryness and being outside of the opportunities that I associate with those younger than myself. My feeling that nothing is growing in my life makes me want to dig under the surface of things to see if there are any new things that might arise. The younger man is the active and creative period of my life during which I did in fact ‘sow a lot of seeds’ which are now emerging into reality. The boy is my impatience but also the aspect of myself from which new ideas and directions can emerge. He is that part of me which is still growing, like the bulbs. The garden is my soul/soil. It is all the work I have done to cultivate skills and attributes in myself and create things in the world. What is important is that even though I am in my fifties, these younger parts were skills and attributes I developed in the past and are still active in me today.

Weeding the garden: Suggests removing the things that you have developed in your life that need removing so your own growth can go easier.

Useful questions and hints:

What is the gardener doing – weeding, planting, digging?

Is there something you are creating in the garden, or something cared for? If so, ask yourself what you are creating, or growing in your life?

The gardener often links with activities in your body, so what you are doing in the garden that directs energy into your body and the world, what is suggested by your activities?

The gardener brings thing to life, and helps them grow to a new dimension, emerging into the light. Are there any signs of this in your dream?

See Summing Up – Martial Art of the Mind – Clicking On