The Gardens Around Us

"To live—is that not enough? Let us then live, let us affirm!"  D.T. Suzuki

I think a lot about my mother these days, as she sits in a wheelchair in an Alzheimer’s unit next to I-69 that leads to the town where I was born over a half a century ago.  If she could see distances, she’d see the new Chase Bank, the LA Fitness, the BP Station, and down the street the Super Target, in the ever-expanding and replicating subtopia that spreads over the farms of central Indiana.

When I visit her, I roll her out of her room and the sterile, homey hallways where women like her roam and wait at the locked doors, hoping someone will let them out.  I take her to the back of the facility, behind the parking lot, where there's a gravel pit of sorts left from road construction. It's surrounded by weeds with tall cotton woods and oak on the other side.  We listen to the birds. We shoot the breeze. We absorb what we can.

My mother had a garden, and I walk in it, circling the paths she's made, as I think about my visit with her before I return to my other life. I watch my father from inside it, as he sits in a lawn chair  on the patio with his oxygen tank as he watches his squirrels.  My mother’s garden is what I’m worried about these days. What is going to happen to it when she's gone?

My mother’s garden is like a lot of gardens in America—not the gardens in the magazines or the ones cared for by teams of Guatemalan men with gas-powered leaf-blowers on their backs. Her garden is the type of garden I like to stop and look at when I walk through neighborhoods of Chicago where I live; one that has defied the cookie cutter landscaper's guide and feels as if someone has spent many years adding to, many years loving it. It sits under a canopy of old American hardwoods, planted there years ago for a farmer's woodlot, before suburbia overtook it in the 60's.  Under the stand of smooth, sexy- barked beech, maples, and fingery-leafed oaks, she has spent 38 years adding creeping ground cover, flowering shrubs, and sticking in whatever would work from the half off rack at the nursery. The soil was terrible though she improved it by mulching and watering.  It grew from a plot that stretched four or five feet out from along the drive way to over-take nearly a half an acre, as she cleared out invasive species and made room for wildflowers, her favorites—like trillium and paint brush and the spring beauties that would blanket the yard in the spring.  She also planted daffodils, scores of them, that over the years turned into hundreds as she separated them and spread them out, bulbs from hers and my father’s mother’s gardens.

Over the years it became a refuge for her and for our family, as the two other neighbors had virtually let their woods completely go and thickets grew so dense that the neighbor’s 1948 Dodge truck disappeared from view.  

My mother gardened until we took her to a dementia unit, that week my father was hospitalized a year and a half ago.  She’d made paths by placing fallen limbs to serve as bordering, and in the last weeks before we had to take her, my sisters and I wandered slowly around those paths with her, helping her to pick up twigs, which was what she did every day in her last months at home. My mother’s garden became a kind of lover, a textured world of sensual pleasures, bird song, shadows, light, variegated color. It held her, as she told me once walking on a beach in Florida, "nature holds us." There she could communicate and be understood; there she was not confused by what was happening to her body and to her mind. It was a sensuous thing to see: her fingering the flowers, kneeling for long moments staring into a patch of pale purple phlox.  

How we relate to the land is the most important subject before our world. Our food, shelter, water, and--yes, the energy that powers most everything we use to sustain our way of life. But, we also need the land, like plants do, to flower. This is not a romantic idea. This is how our skin and other sensual organs work.  We are pollinated, one might say, our brains feed on the nectar of what our perceptions absorb from the world around us.

My mother left us this garden and I’m not so sure what will become of it—become of her wooded sanctuary of spring beauties and trillium and periwinkle and vines of poison ivy. 

This past spring, my father told me that the man, who lived across the street, came over and told him that his wife had died, a woman in her late forties, of diabetes.  And then, he added: “You know, the oddest thing happened before she died. I didn't tell you this, did I? This man came up to the door one morning and said he had a favor to ask. ‘My wife is very sick,’ he said, ‘and I’d like to bring her some of your daffodils, would you mind? We always looked at them from our window. She always liked those daffodils. Could I take a few?’ Well, I told him, you just take as many as you want. I was going to tell him, you know, about mom, but I think, I think he knew.”

WISDOM FROM MY MOTHER AND MOROCCO

While most of America was under snow last week, I snuck down to Florida to spend some time with my parents. On my way to the airport, I nearly got into a traffic accident as a trunk squeezed my taxi nearly into a parked car. The cab driver, a young Moroccan man in a hooded sweatshirt, shrugged his shoulders, sighed some prayer to Allah and we went on. “I don’t get upset any more at these things,” he told me as if explaining to himself. We’d bonded and he went on to give me his philosophy of driving he’d picked up from an old Indian man he knew from his cab company: “Doesn’t pay to rush. You do your job and thank God, for what comes to you. In the long run, you are happier, you don’t get so much of the stress, and you are thinking more of God. And this is the better way.” He was happy to tell me this. We talked on about politics in America and in North Africa. He was excited about events there. (Though he reminded me that, like so many immigrants from North Africa, he’d come here to find work as there was little chance for him there.) Yet he was proud of his country. He told me that Morocco was the first country to recognize America after its independence.

When I told him, I was going to visit my parents in Florida. He turned around for the first time, smiling under his hood. “You are a good son.”

I sighed. My parents are aging and it’s hard sometimes to watch this. My mother is struggling with dementia (or Alzheimer, no one knows). My Moroccan cab driver heard the sigh. “Tell me, when you come back from visiting your parents, how do you feel?”

“I feel . . . I feel always better. You’re right.”

“I know I’m right. They took care of us. Now we take care of them.” (He’d told me that he sends money home as often as he can, and he’d helped pay for their new house along with his brothers.)

In northern Florida, I spent every day walking with my mother on the beach and into the inter-coastal dunes and oak and manzanita groves on the barrier islands where they spend part of the winter. Each morning, we walked an hour or so. And at night after my parents went to bed, I’d walk back on to the beach, where it always gives me the sense that you are walking in space, as the sound of the surf and soft sand seems to lift you out of your small thoughts and up into the stars.

But it’s with my mother where I always seem to learn something new about walking, which is to say, something I’d ignored about what happens to our body when we reconnect to the land around us. When my parents came to this part of Florida twenty years ago I found the area of quaint beaches and the endless inter-coastal wetlands boring. Over the years, in my visits I’ve hiked about and kayaked and fished and found more fascinating each year. This is the area, I’ve learned, where the Spanish first landed in the continental US. It’s also the same area (roughly) where Charles Bartram, the 18^th century Philadelphia naturalist, made his drawings and observations about natural history as part of his walks through the Southeast. Bartram’s Travels, chronicled with a lyrical but lucid prose, is often credited with being a major influence on the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, as well as a hundred years later, inspiring a young John Muir, who trekked from Indiana to these same wetlands to follow in Bartram’s footsteps.

With my mother, we walked as naturalists, too, picking up seashells, pointing at the pelicans and skittering sandpipers, marveling at the osprey with the snake dangling over the telephone wires where he perched. We always make a pilgrimage, a long walk around the beach to Fort Matanza National Coastal Park. A wonderful park with interpretative board walks along the shore and coastal waterway. Here we invariably meet my parent’s neighbors out for their morning walks. There, we find our prize, nesting in the great Spanish oaks, the great horned owl, warming her egg. My mother has a hard time spotting it but feels the excitement and presence of the wondrous owl just the same.

Over past few years with onset of memory loss and the cognitive impairment of Alzheimer’s, my mother’s pace has slowed. She can’t always discern the level of the ground from shadows and changes of light. The beach is easier for her somehow. Perhaps, she trusts it from all the years she’s walked on it, relying more on the feel of her feet than on what her mind might misinterpret. She’s more relaxed and thus more lucid. But, then again, so am I.

Walking gives her a sense of agency and adventure and certainly a sense of joy and freedom. And this, in fact, is extremely important to all of us, but especially those suffering from memory loss and cognitive impairment. Recent studies have shown that walking three or more times a week for at least a mile has a marked improvement on brain plasticity and cognitive health.

Why? Circulation and heart rate are improved, of course, but perhaps more importantly the intricate relationships in the brain circuitry are maintained via the variety of actions being carried out by the body as we walk. Think about it. Orbetter feel it next time you walk. We think, we move, we see, we feel, we haveemotions, all in fractions of seconds as we simply take one step. Link.

As much as I can, I try to slow to her pace, noticing the ferns growing on the mossy limbs, the raccoon tracks in the sand, listening to the cardinals overhead. But I’m still too fast. And then my mother asks, from behind. “You don’t like to walk slow, do you?” I turn. She’s looking out at something in the wooded undergrowth of the oak groves, and if talking to it and not me, declares to all who might walk too fast in the world: “I liked to walk slow. It’s better that way. More interesting.” And then finding me again, “There’s so much here to see, isn’t there?”

From my Moroccan cab driver to my mother, I’m trying to get the message.

Walking and the Brain

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it . . . if one keeps on walking, everything will be all right." Soren Kierkegaard

Despite the many anxieties and crises of our time, we are also living in era of revolutionary developments in the fields of science, particularly in the study of the human brain. Every month we are learning more about how the brain functions, and consequently, beliefs about learning, memory, the imagination, emotion, and a whole host of other brain functions now must be re-evaluated. We now know, for example, that the brain evolves and changes as we age, countering long held beliefs that past a certain age in childhood the largely remained unchanged. We do in fact lose brain cells or neurons as we age but the brain’s ability to make new pathways or synaptic connections between neurons is virtually limitless. No, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Environment, experience, exercise, attitude, social engagement, and intellectual challenges are profoundly important for the on-going development of the bran and it’s health.

Recently, several studies have caught my attention that relate to walking and spending time in nature. Last week, in fact, a major study done at the University of Illinois by Kramer and Moss who study the role of how exercise affects the brain, they found that regular walking (forty minutes 3 days a week) dramatically affected brain connectivity and thus enhancing cognition. This was true as well with older adults, a helpful sign for people suffering from memory loss, dementia and Alzheimer's.

Another study at the University of Michigan looked at how where we walk affects brain function and concentration. In the study, one group of graduate students walked in urban an area—along busy commercial streets with traffic and little natural buffering, and another group walked along paths in more natural environments of parks with trees, grass, lakes, etc. Afterward the two groups were given basic cognitive tests, recalling lists, etc. And the difference in cognitive function was clear: those who walked in natural environments were much better in their scores. A similar study at Michigan also tested three groups for the role of nature on brain function. In this study, one group was wired as they watched a video screen of a natural environment, another group simply looked at a wall, and a third actually sat in the same natural area viewed on the screen of the first group. The result? The levels of brain activity i.e. the stimulation of various parts of the brain was most pronounced in the group sitting outside viewing the natural environment. But most interesting to me was that the levels of those looking at a wall and at the video image of nature was virtually the same.

Walking in nature seems so benign. But walking is actually much more of a complex physiological activity than we think; it involves multiple areas of the brain, which is why it is so beneficial. In nature, we must also negotiate pathways and environments that are unpredictable and highly stimulating. Motor function and perception are profoundly linked and being aware of this relationship enhances not only the pleasure but also the long-term health of our brain. Our brain is pattern maker and a pattern decoder. Every day we create new patterns by what we do, think, feel, and experience. And one pattern to weave into our lives is very simple: walking.