Mounted on Cherry Wood · 45 cm · Stoneware with Underglaze · 24ct Gold
You went looking for it everywhere.
In other people's eyes. In places you had never been. In words someone said once that you carried like seeds in your pocket for years, hoping they would bloom if you just found the right soil. You searched in books, in temples, in the silence between what was said and what was meant.
You crossed oceans inside yourself looking for the shore.
And the whole time... it was growing where you stood. inside and beneath you.
This is one cruel kindness the universe keeps...
that what you seek has never been elsewhere.
Not in the teacher;
not in the love;
not in the holy place;
not in the next version of yourself that you keep promising you will become.
You were the garden all along, it was never waiting for you to arrive.
Waiting for you to look down and see that your own roots had already broken through the stone.
We are taught to reach.
To seek.
To become.
To fix what is broken and find what is missing.
And so we spend our lives with our hands open toward the horizon, begging the world to place in our palms what was already beating in our chest.
The love you wanted. It is yours.
Not because someone gave it to you but because it is what you are made of.
The magic you admired in others, might be the case that it was always your own light, reflected back to you because you were not yet ready to see it at its source.
Nothing needs to be found.
Nothing needs to be fixed.
Nothing needs to be earned or deserved or proven.
You are not on your way to the garden.
You are not almost there.
You are not one lesson, one healing, one heartbreak away from becoming what you already are.
You were the garden all along. Every flower you ever longed for is already blooming
... has always been blooming ...
in the soil of your own being.
And the moment you stop running toward the horizon and place your hands on your own earth, you will feel it.
The roots.
The pulse.
The quiet, unstoppable blossoming that no season can end and no winter can reach.
