The secret garden in life

Jefferson Breland

(7/2024) I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to write for you, dear reader.

I write about topics important to me which I always believe, through my often unconventional point of view, may help you in some small way.

Since my thinking is not always linear, I ask you again to bear with me as I attempt to link seemingly unconnected ideas into some coherence.

According to Chinese medicine, Summer is the season associated with the Heart. Heart is capitalized here because it represents the spirit of the heart, not just the pump that circulates blood.

The capital "H" heart, is the energetic vehicle through which we manifest our purpose in life. Heart is associated with family, love, trust, and our destiny.

June has another association for me also related to the Heart: Grief.

June is the month during which my sister died in 1965 and my father died in 2014. Curiously, they passed on the same date, June 16. Also, interesting to me, June 16 is also the birthdate of my father’s mother who left us in October of 1985.

I have heard that our level of grief is related to our level of love for who or what is no more. Grief is not limited to people or pets. It can also be for opportunities, jobs, a beloved business, a favorite home, sentimental objects such as jewelry, our reputation, and our health. Basically, we can grieve anything meaningful to us.

I have reached the age where more and more friends are writing the obituaries of their parents.

In early May, I gathered with my two brothers of another mother who I have known since 1968. I am generally considered the fourth brother. If you are keeping track of the math, one brother was not there, at least in body. Phil, the middle brother and my best friend died in November of 2011.

We had gathered in Pittsburgh to inter the ashes of their aunt in the family plot. It was here we saw the head stones of an uncle who passed in the 1980s and their grandparents and great grandparents.

We noted to each other that the date of her interment was exactly one year to the day after their mother’s memorial and interment. We also remembered that it was one year and a day since the youngest brother and I opened an exhibit to honor the life of my father, Bruce, as an artist, teacher of art, and father at a gallery in Pittsburgh.

One might think I would have realized the weight or profundity of these concurrences, but, it wasn’t until I got home and sat quietly that I realized I have been in mourning for the past year. Several days later I developed an "unproductive" cough. The "unproductive" here generally refers to not coughing up sputum.

I believe this is a misnomer. According to Chinese medicine, grief affects the Lungs. This information helped me to understand I was processing the emotion of grief through the coughing. I should not simply blame the cheese on all the Mineo’s pizza (my favorite in the whole world) I had eaten in Pittsburgh.

By understanding this "dry" cough was related to grief, I knew it actually had a purpose and therefore was not "unproductive." The cough was helping me on the energetic level. If I had taken cough suppressants, my body would have taken longer to process the emotional energy of grief or shifted the energy of the grief to another part of my body and created other symptoms. This is the "mortal game of whack-a-mole" I referred to in last month’s column.

Understanding this background emotion of grief of the past year helped explain to me why my friends’ tributes to their just-passed parents had been particularly moving recently. We are the oldest adults in our families now.

Not only that, two days before the interment, I visited with a long-time friend who buried his mother after a long illness in the Spring of 2023. He had been particularly wrecked by his mother’s passing as he was an only child and his father had passed almost 50 years ago.

A year ago he had asked me if I knew the purpose of death from my study of Eastern philosophy. At that time I told him, "Perhaps it is not meant for us to understand. Death is for the dead. Life is for the living." I left it that.

Understanding I have been unconsciously mourning for the past year offered a context for my feelings of the past year. I have been moody, putting on a smile when appropriate, and not quite as energetic as I usually am.

After a year of musing on the nature of grief, I had a different answer for my friend. Death is necessary for us to fully understand life. Grief is a necessary emotion for us to fully develop as human beings.

I believe this is a bit different than the old chestnuts of "Without death, there is no life" or more obvious, "Without life, there is no death."

This goes beyond the belief that death helps us appreciate life. While that may be true, this is an example of Yin-Yang principle in action.

If we look at the interplay between seeming opposites, life and death, we can see that they actually help nourish each other. In the case of food, animals and plants die so that we may live.

In the example of my father, during the year’s preparation for the exhibit, I went through his old files, looked at hundreds and hundreds of photographs of his work and interactions with students, hundreds of documents he kept about his work, and project proposals, and correspondence with peers and students.

I was able to see him through the lens of his art work, of his role as a teacher, and as a member of the global art community. He became alive to me in the context of his life away from our home and his role as a father. I gained an even greater respect for him.

Grief affords us the opportunity to take stock of what really matters. It is an opportunity to discover the gifts of another’s life in our life. I discovered my father and I were even more alike than I knew. Our shared gifts and talents showed up differently in me than they did in him.

I was talking with a new acquaintance today. She expressed regret that she had not paid more attention to her father’s gift as a gardener. She said he had a green thumb and neighbors were always coming by asking for the amazing vegetables, especially, tomatoes, he grew. She said she wished she had paid more attention to how he did what he did.

Based on what she had said to me earlier in our conversation about how she was raising her children, I offered this; she had paid attention to the teachings of her father. They simply manifested differently in her life. I offered that how her father was in the garden was how he showed up in every aspect of his life. I offered that her garden was her family.

She was planting the seeds of being a good human being. She was making sure they were getting the sun they needed, the nutrition they needed, and weeding out behaviors and ideas that did not help them on their path to becoming the best they can be.

Her regret was actually grief. She longed for the wisdom of her father as a gardener not realizing she was also in his garden, his garden of life.

May you also discover the hidden gifts in your life’s Garden.

Jefferson Breland is a board-certified acupuncturists licensed in Pennsylvania and Maryland with offices in Gettysburg and Towson, respectively.
He can be reached at 410-336-5876.