The Oakland Rose Garden

Dear all,

The sun is out! Wishing you all a very happy Easter, and good rest and recoup in the coming spring days.

I am on leave the next couple of weeks. Mindfulness lunchtime drop-ins resume on Monday 20^th April and Friday 24th, 1.10-1.50pm, in the Chaplaincy in Bristo Square.

There are places remaining on my Mindfulness Course for Staff and PGRs, beginning Weds April 22^nd. We've had strong sign-up so far, but would love to reach more PhD students; do circulate to your teams and networks.

A note for all medical students: Dr Agata Dunsmore is organising Wellbeing Wednesday at the Royal Infirmary, a weekly lunchtime meditation session in Chancellor's Building for 30 mins at 1pm (see flyer), using my Library of Mindfulness Practices. A great opportunity to explore mindfulness practices with peers.

For this week's MindLetter, I found a secret garden...

The Oakland Rose Garden

Jenny Odell is an artist and writer who lives in Oakland, California. The cover of her 2019 book How to Do Nothing is an image of a swell of roses, the kind you see growing wild on the sea-front of East Lothian. Early in the book, Odell describes how when she wants to get away from her laptop, she heads to the Oakland Rose Garden. Built in the 1930s, as part of the major works that sought to revitalise the US economy in the Great Depression, the Rose Garden is an expanse of rose beds defined by paths that curve and shape their way in intricate patterns. A haven of birds, bugs and plants, for Odell the garden is labyrinthine, a place with neither end nor ends. You could easily go there a hundred times and never take quite the same route.

Most importantly, it is a public space: ‘you don’t have to buy anything, or pretend to want to buy something, to be there.’ For all its history, it was nearly razed in the 1970s to build condos. ‘Spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat,’ writes Odell, ‘since what they “produce” can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified – despite the fact that anyone in the neighbourhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides’.

Odell argues that a similar battle is taking place for our time and attention. Social media grabs both – hours of it – for profit, selling it on to advertisers, while we learn to view our lives through the lens of potential IG-, LinkedIn- or £-sized bites. Meanwhile, the parts of our humanity that we retain for ourselves diminish. We empty ourselves out in pursuit of capital we can bank, status we can hold, the illusion of a final resting-place that will never quite arrive.

What is the outcome of this emptying? Odell, who taught at Stanford for many years, writes that ‘Among my students and in many of the people I know, I see so much energy, so much intensity, and so much anxiety. I see people caught up not just in notifications but in a mythology of productivity and progress, unable not only to rest but simply to see where they are.’

I see this capture too; I also see how people instinctively find ways to resist these forces, have done since time immemorial. In the 1960s it was ‘dropping out’, fleeing urban life for aspired utopia elsewhere. Today, it might be burnout. Either way, it is an ‘out’, a way to say no when other means have been exhausted. For many people the body decides, breaking down when what is at stake can no longer be tolerated. This is often experienced as inexplicable, frightening, or failing; discovering one’s emptied-out places can feel like an existential threat. But the nub of burnout is something healthy: a part of us seeking something better, wiser, deeper. We seek, perhaps, a sojourn in a rose garden.

Such a place is what Odell calls a ‘third space’, beyond the in-or-out strictures seemingly presented by the world at large. The questions we encounter at the crux of it all are not, at root, questions of whether to participate in the world, she suggests, but rather of how. We will not, most of us, drop out or burn out on a permanent basis; most of the communes were short-lived, paradoxically presenting their seeking souls with the inevitability of being-in-the-world.

Nor will we move into the rose garden, for if we were to do so, we would probably take with us our laptops and our condos. Slowly, the garden would disappear, its labyrinthine paths paved over like the apocryphal parking lot, until we found ourselves anew in search of birds, bugs and bees, drawn by a faint memory of something we once touched, a vista we once saw. And so we must go to the rose garden instead on the understanding that we are visitors, stopping only for a while; that it has something to teach us, and that we are willing. It might be only for the tiniest fragment of time. It might be as small a space as one bloom on the roadside.

For me, this week, it has been reading Odell, drawn in by her stories of art and philosophy, film and ecology, history and politics. I read her voraciously on bus and on sofa and over meals, in this last week of work before Easter. Sometimes, we don’t know how depleted we are until we begin to feel again what sustains, enlivens, restores strength. Hope is about keeping the faith, in the drop-out or burnout, numb-out or opt-out, that there is a force inside us that fiercely loves our life, that seeks to bloom again one rose garden at a time.

If you, too, are feeling the nudge towards retreat and reflection, it must be time for a holiday: find yourself a ‘third space’ of landscape, time, or attention over these next couple of weeks, and rest well.

Warm wishes,

Kitty