“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods…
I love not man the less, but Nature more” 
― Lord Byron

During the Age of Discovery in the 15th century, botanists and naturalists joined Spanish expeditions to the New World collecting and recording plant specimens, seeds and vegetation encountered during the voyages. These specimens were transported around the globe and headed to the estates of European wealthy and university collections. Several seedlings from North and South America voyages were transported to the University of Valencia, Spain, in 1567, and their posterity can be seen towering in the Jardí Botànic de la Universitat de València, the Valencia Botanical Gardens, and in the terraced herb beds. Standing at the base of these gargantuan oak, cypress and fig trees this last week and looking up was dizzying and inspiring.

As an Autumn baby, I wake up from summer slumber when the air cools, and the angle of the sun shifts. The thyme, rosemary and mint perfuming the air for butterflies at the botanical garden, and beckoning benches under bamboo and pomegranate trees captivated Steve and I for an entire afternoon. The chattering of people at outdoor cafes was drowned to the sound of the pine boughs whispering in the wind. Nature emits a siren song on a frequency we hear, and the doves cooing and burbling fountain added to a perfect symphony of sight and sound. Green space is my happy place, and strolling though the botanical gardens on an October day, where the sun’s shadows stretched content as the basking cats tucked here and there, was truly restorative.

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees… I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.” 
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Instagram is filled with those who want to influence others to buy, wear and try what they are pushing to be happy, but Thoreau, who went to the woods to live for a time, understood that nature is, and should be, the great influencer if we want to be happy. “Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” 
― Henry David Thoreau,  Walden. I choose to be influenced by nature, to be imbued with oxygen and enlightened by the wisdom of the seasons.

My cousin Loretta wrote and asked me if living in Spain seemed like a dream, and if I pinched myself everyday just to make sure the beauty around me was real? I wrote back and said, ‘Sometimes the beauty in Spain is so real and so lovely, that it hurts. Sometimes it feels like I am dreaming after the hardships we have passed through, although I am wide awake and enjoying the last drop of everything.’ I have gone through existence with the notion that time and experiences are finite, so I must get to the marrow of the experience, the kernel of truth, and absorb what is real before moving on. Sometimes the experience of getting to what is real is hard and painful as Margery Bianco aptly wrote in the Velveteen Rabbit:

‘Does it hurt becoming real?’ asked the Rabbit. 

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’ 

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’ 

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

The truth is we cannot live in such magnificent surroundings and not be deeply moved and irrevocably changed as we become real. We know this time we have, away from election drama, viruses and life’s challenges is a gift. If we leave here in a year or two, we will never be the same after touching the rough bark of thousand year old trees, tasting decadent oranges warm from the sunshine and being surrounded by a people who love their families and are kind to those who are different from them.

We followed up the botanical garden’s beauty a few days later by finding a romantic gem called the Monfort gardens or Jardín de Monforte, situated across the Turia river. The gardens are set in the old orchard bought in 1849 by the Marquis of San Juan, and are styled in a neoclassic design with romanesque statues, grottos, fountains, bougainvillea blooming over a ‘love tunnel,” surrounded by well manicured shrubbery mazes. Two little girls in traditional Spanish costumes with shawls and fans were having their pictures taken, a dad sat and read a newspaper as his newborn child slept and a couple sat and stole kisses, and I couldn’t help but smile and know how blessed we are for this moment of perfection. To sit and inhale nature’s beauty.

The thought fluttered across my mind as we meandered around the gardens that took a hundred years to grow this lush… I wonder how long it takes to grow into yourself and know what you are about? To become real? Is it the end of middle age? Older? When our eyes lose vision but gain insight? When our skin becomes slack but is still capable of hugging others tightly? Like a Flamenco dancer, can we not not express and fully know ourselves until we have suffered deeply and loved the unlovable? is this what it means to be real? As a child of a master gardener, the thought came to me, that the shoots we nurture, the replanting, the weed pulling in the gardens of our life, they are the indefinite quest. ‘Keep on Gardening’ I heard whispered in the breeze.

“In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.” Alice Walker