How do you define your garden? Do you consider your workplace your atelier? Where exactly is the edge of your dance floor anyway?

I’ve been thinking about Chauncey Gardiner again lately. Tending my garden in Guignier might have something to do with it. Every now and then something will remind me of the 1979 film Being There, where Chauncey Gardiner is an actual gardener played by Peter Sellers.

The movie is based on a short book by Jerzy Kosiński. If you haven’t seen it, the plot revolves around Chauncey, a contemplative fellow who has been tending the garden of a wealthy recluse since his youth, with television being his only window into the outer world.

Circumstances force Chauncey to face the wilds of Washington D.C. for the first time in his life, (a sequence worth seeing, and not just for Eumir Deodato’s version of Also Spake Zarathustra ‘2001’).

An accidental turn events lands him in high society, where his innocence and reliance on simple metaphors gleaned from the garden serve to elevate him at every turn.

I’ll let you watch it to see how it ends, but the point it makes for me is that extending your metaphors can bring miracles to your life.

Think about your ‘happy place’. It might be the dance floor, your workshop, your art studio, or your garden. It’s somewhere different for everyone. It’s the place where time falls away and the outside world doesn’t matter.

It might cross over with entertainment, or your social life, or your professional career, but more likely it’s where you’re putting that unique part of yourself into something.

Inside your “garden“ you have a way of being yourself and a way of being in the world that expresses both your inner child and your highest self. Ideas flow feely, you probably do your best thinking there.

So ask yourself how you can extend that metaphor beyond the gates of your garden, or the walls of your studio, or the edge of your dance floor — wherever your place may be. Apply the lessons and embed them in the rest of your world.

And with that, the bees are buzzing, so back to the garden I go!

Much love till next Monday!

Merci et à bientôt!

M+

ML #672

Mark Metz
Monday Love Movement Calendar