Growing Season: A Healing Journey Into the Heart of Nature

Rating:
Summary: Expect to be forever changed by an hour in this book.
Review: Spending time in Arlene Bernstein's garden is an act of love. Her journey through love,pain,planting,marriage,immense grief and joy conspire to make the reader at once more in touch with both the earth and themselves. Her book nourishes and heals.. Her visual imagery of the gorgeous Napa Valley hills is matched by a nurturing insight into our most basic selves. I was moved and awed by her journey. This is time well spent.

Rating:
Summary: a book about what gardening can teach us about living well
Review: This little book--its 200 pages, in an attractive format, take at most two hours to read--is about surviving and growing as a healthy adult, in spite of--or perhaps because of--the obstacles, even tragedies, that occur in ordinary lives.

It is written by a woman who bore and lost two children, and who describes coming to terms not only with her childlessness, but also with the challenges of maintaining a loving relationship with her partner,whose ways of being and of coping with grief are different from hers.

She is a gardener, and her descriptions of working in a garden, and learning from vegetables and flowers about how to cooperate with nature instead of fighting it, and how to live in the present and feel the joy of the moment, are vivid and direct. Her account of creating a garden and of simultaneously learning self-acceptance are often beautiful, and always convincing. The tone is of simplicity and candor; of a voice which is always honest, unpretentious and generous.Here is a typical example, about pruning old grape vines:

" . . . the shapes of the older plants are unorthodox. There is no way to use pruning rules on them. This gives me great freedom, with no judgements attached of right or wrong, too much wood or too little. I give myself permission to stand before each plant, quiet and empty of thought, until I get a visceral sensation, almost an invitation to join in a dance. Then,slowly at first, I'll cut out the fruiting canes from last year . . . I wait for a quickening, as I and the vine communicate, as one shoot or another catches my eye and I accept the invitation or not . . ."

The overdone term "grounded" applies here, and is not intended as a pun. It is because the author really has worked hard in the garden, and because her carrots and grapevines are so solidly known and described, that the undertone of mysticism which runs through the book never runs away with it. She seems to have learned, from meditation and study combined with hard physical work, an acceptance of what is and an appreciation of what can be that, in its modest way, succeeds for the reader in showing how, in an ordinary life, the spiritual and the material can be fused.