The Garden of Love....
I have often been fascinated with the poem the Garden of Love by William Blake. Yet, I only feel I began to get a glimpse of understanding of this poem once we began to explore the role of Love in our work.
The Garden of Love, is the possibility we all have in our hearts for Divine Love. The first time we fall in love or every time we feel the stirring of love in our hearts, it is an awakening of our souls through love. When we are young teens, there is certainty of the heart and passion in our being, as Eros begins to strike a note in our souls. Mervyn used to describe the first kiss as the first time the soul awakens and enters the Garden of Love. This kind of love is the domain of the soul, filled with joy, hydrogens and a new awareness of our soul being released from the confines of the machine.
When Blake enters the Garden of Love as an adult, he observes what he has never seen in his early youth, that the machine has built a chapel of feminine dominance to restrict and control love. Our personality learns from experience that love and sex is fraught with conditions, or shame. We forget about loving purely.. we forget about the sacredness of this Garden of delights for the soul. The machine's instinctive center, just like the priests doing their rounds, wants to own love, and to control it with religious preaching and social form. Our personality creates identifications or lives in imagination about love and relationships, sometimes because of painful experiences or wrong use of the sex center.
When Blake enters the garden in remembrance of the sweet flowers of souls awakening in their youth, he sees tombstones of men and women dead to love through closed hearts. The priests are "binding with briars the joys and desires" of their souls. Our machines serve and fulfill the force of organic life, to reproduce and keep order of nature. Yet as students we are here to serve a higher order of creation. Perhaps we can serve as gardeners or blossoming flowers with a sweet scent of awakened souls in love. We can continue to enter and take care of this garden created for us by divinity and open to us for eternity. Blake may be reminding us to restore the Garden of Love in our hearts, to its original form - a return to beauty and sacredness of the soul in a state of love and grace.
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
~F
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