What is A Memory Garden???

I found this reading on the web and thought it was a good piece to share with you all. After reading it myself I had a better insight into what they mean. How everybody that puts something in a memory garden makes a special place to grieve and begin healing over the loss of someone special to them. When I had first suggested this idea to mom I was not sure what others would have thought about having a place to let the life of my father live on. With every piece put in the garden....there is a special meaning behind what you planted there. For me...I have yet to find that special something to put there. How come it is so hard for me to get something to plant there?? Is it because I am not ready to let go in my own heart to have that part of me and him in a place of peace. Am I not at peace myself that I can not let go.

Enough blabbling.....this is what I found on the web today. I can not wait to see the pictures from yesterday.

A garden is one of the forms that memory takes, as it brings together will with time and land. It is not by chance, then, that many people plant a garden in memory of loved ones who have died. In the garden memory becomes a place, and instead of sinking into the mists of oblivion, it emerges and grows, changing and adding shapes and colors. Let it be said: It is not memory itself that is the garden.

Memory undergoes a profound transformation - from person, from gaze, from grief, from happiness - into leaves, soil and stones, flowers and treetops, and it also undergoes a sharp change of direction: from receding past to approaching future. And from that change evolves another change, perhaps the most potent of all: In the transition to garden, memory moves from closed to open, from hidden to visible, from silence to speech, from thought to hands

Only one who has reconciled himself to the death of a loved one can plant a garden in the beloved's memory, because in the act of creating the garden, as in the most trenchant grief, resides a spark of joy; joy made of the grief itself, which has now become another branch in the consciousness. Nor is it by chance that those who plant a garden in memory of dear ones love to have guests in the garden. Gardens of memory, even if planted next to the house, are not simply a home accessory meant to aorn and cultivate the owner's pleasure; they are a place of guests intended to open memory to a panoply of gazes and to the participation of an entire community. They are like an obverse funeral. Instead of lamentations and eulogies, there is astonishment at the beauty of the garden and at grief's metamorphosis into flowers, a transformation that belongs to all by virtue of their ability to contain grief.