Horsemanship for Health

Our community garden is small. Every week, even during rain and hail, volunteers come to take care of it. They have dug some steps down to the compost area, cleared the space between the beech hedges, and laid four vegetable beds on cardboard. They do this out of love.

Each week they create something new and alive from what was a dormant space. They have planted garlic and onions, fruit bushes and herbs. I put in some dwarf narcissi bulbs that were sitting in my vegetable rack. Before we started the project, a few people looked over the gate and saw only mess and menial work. The garden had no meaning for them at that time and so they moved away. This created space for others to come forward with ideas of how to transform it. And now, rather wonderfully, their ideas are beginning to take shape in the form of conversations, enthusiasms, previous experiences and fresh insights.

The garden is giving people hope. ‘I love it here and never want to leave,’ shared one volunteer last week. The garden has become a safe space in which to connect and open up. It rings with laughter and robin song. It feels light and warm even in bitter March. We had no grand vision when we started it. We have simply let it show us what it needed and what it most needed was time and love.

This small project also gives me hope. It is not something I need to direct. The volunteers know what they are doing better than I do. All I have asked for are vegetables and salad I can one day eat. Now I am not even so bothered about that. We may lose what they have planted to slugs or pigeons or blight. It’s not the outcome of fresh homegrown vegetables piled up in a basket that fills me with satisfaction, but the knowledge that this garden is taking care of us in other ways. It is uniting us and motivating us to craft something lovely together.

I believe we can only truly create from a foundation of love. Hard work, qualifications, experience and structure are all useful, but we can get by with so much less than we think we need. So many creative projects never see the light of day because they never really move out of the preparation stage. For years I researched story ideas I never got round to actually writing. The same goes for film ideas, and new business ideas. It is possible to start something new and get people interested in the service you are offering, but, I believe that without love your service will never truly flourish.

It’s not possible to manufacture love for an impossible project that most people shake their heads and walk away from. This kind of inspiration comes from inside. It’s the light that comes on in a volunteer’s eyes when you show them a stretch of bare earth covered with weeds and old carpet and they start to imagine it as it could be, not how it is.

I love the way they are creating this garden. This week a watercolour popped into my messages. A vision of loveliness. I asked the volunteer if I could share it and she said yes. When people who have been hurt hard by life say yes to creating something beautiful together, it lifts us all. I can’t wait to see what they will make of the garden as we properly move into spring.