But he who seeks the flowers of truth
Must quit the garden for the field

The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.

Who sees the meaning of the flower uprooted in the ploughed field? The ploughman who does not look beyond its boundaries and does not raise his eyes from the ground ? No — but the poet who sees that field in its relations with the universe, and looks oftener to the sky than on the ground. Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though, in truth, his dreaming must not be out of proportion to his waking!

How much more satisfying had we been placed in a garden custom-made for us, its other occupants put there for us to use as we saw fit. There is a celebrated story in the Western tradition like this, except that not quite everything was there for us. There was one particular tree of which we were not to partake, a tree of knowledge. Knowledge and understanding and wisdom were forbidden to us in this story. We were to be kept ignorant. But we couldn’t help ourselves. We were starving for knowledge — created hungry, you might say. This was the origin of all our troubles. In particular, it is why we no longer live in a garden: We found out too much. So long as we were incurious and obedient, I imagine, we could console ourselves with our importance and centrality, and tell ourselves that we were the reason the Universe was made. As we began to indulge our curiosity, though, to explore, to learn how the Universe really is, we expelled ourselves from Eden. Angels with a flaming sword were set as sentries at the gates of Paradise to bar our return. The gardeners became exiles and wanderers. Occasionally we mourn that lost world, but that, it seems to me, is maudlin and sentimental. We could not happily have remained ignorant forever.

He who does not love a flower, has lost all love and fear of God.

To wander in the fields of flowers pull the thorns from your own heart.

Do not go to the garden of flowers!
O Friend! go not there;
In your body is the garden of flowers.
Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus, and there gaze on the Infinite Beauty.

If you can’t smell the fragrance don’t come into the garden of Love. If you’re unwilling to undress don’t enter into the stream of Truth. Stay where you are. Don’t come our way.

Tell him, too,” she said, “never to pluck flowers, and to think every bush may be a goddess in disguise.

No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.

We’ve got to have forbidden fruit, Or Eden’s joys for us are moot.

I may not enter the garden, Though I know the road thereto; And morn by morn to the gateway I see the children go.

The greed for fruit misses the flower.

No Through Road

All in vain, I will cease now
My long absorption with the plough,
With the tame and the wild creatures
And man united with the earth.
I have failed after many seasons
To bring truth to birth,
And nature's simple equations
In the mind's precincts do not apply.

But where to turn? Earth endures
After the passing, necessary shame
Of winter, and the old lie
Of green places beckons me still
From the new world, ugly and evil,
That men pry for in truth's name.