
This painting is considered by many as Van Gogh’s finest floral, and one of the only two paintings he chose to exhibit publicly. It was painted after breakfast on the first day at the asylum where he went to heal after mutilating his ear.
The garden has always been a place for healing, and the fact that Van Gogh found some healing comfort in painting these lovely things I find incredibly moving. A poster of these irises has been living with me for years, hanging over a hutch in my dining room in my last home. And now it adds its blue and turquoise dazzle to my pool room bath, decorated in blues and turquoise, shells and candles, and other sea inspired paintings.
The sea too, like the garden, has always been a healing place. Spending time there gives us a sense of coming home, connecting us not only to nature at its finest, but also to some deeper sense of calm and beauty that we recognize instrinsically as part of our primal nature. When we are hurting or out of sorts, seeking that connection brings us home to ourselves and we find healing. Music and art share those healing qualities.
That call for us to come “back to the garden” for healing and renewal is found in an old song from the sixties, one of my favorites, that I listened to recently when doing research on a new novel. The song isn’t actually called “back to the garden” as I’d thought. But a google search of those words brought me to it nonetheless. It was written by Joni Mitchell in 1968. The trio Crosby, Stills, and Nash were the first to sing it, and made it famous, but I like the way Joni sings it better. She named it “Woodstock,” but it’s less about that famous festival than the idea behind it. It captures the spirit of the times, that hope of healing the nation, of turning the turmoil of the times—“the bombers riding shotgun in the sky”—-“into butterflies.”
You may remember the song’s intoxicating refrain:
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
The garden evokes the Garden of Eden, a time before The Fall. And the reference to stardust, of course, reminds us of our even more primal origin, the fact that the stuff of which we are made is the stuff of stars.
Whether we go to the garden for healing, or the sea, what we are really doing is connecting with some primal part of ourselves that includes the whole universe of being. If only we truly knew and understood what that means, turning bombers into butterflies, or a mutilated ear into irises, would be inevitable.
Garden goodness. 💚🌎
Yes, indeed!
I love that song!
Her voice is amazing! I’ve been enjoying revisiting a lot of my old 60s favorites lately. Lots of great stuff back then that never gets old.
Lots to love here! For the record, my ‘mishearing of lyrics’ on this piece is two-fold:
“Back to the ***car again***” instead of “Back to the garden” (my thinking at the time was it related to the referenced hitchhikers/people walking along the road to Yasgur’s farm, etc)
But the one I always hoped my parents couldn’t hear (which in fact I heard wrong, anyway) was:
“We were heavily stoned” instead of “We were half a million strong.”
I do prefer my mistaken takes to the original lyrics, even to this day!
BTW: Joni Mitchell…a true stardust lady!
peace, flower sister.
Thanks, Laura! So funny about the misheard lyrics. I’ve done that a lot too. The most recent was the discovery that the exquisitely romantic lyrics I heard Dylan sing “She tastes just like a woman,” was actually “She takes just like a woman.” Not romantic at all! I prefer my version too!
You mean it’s **not** “She tastes just like a woman”? Seriously, I didn’t know! Funny, that…
Definitely our way is better!
😎
Definitely!