Garden History

The five keys of the Unseen For the Persians, the word garden  meant Paradise : a place of beauty, harmony, and peace where everything exists in perfect correspondence. And it’s precisely this correspondence  that I’d like to reflect on. The garden is a gentle workshop of creation, one that speaks in the language of nature rather than the noise of humankind. Flowers reveal their secrets only to those who observe with patience. They trust that only a few will truly understand.

Today, I found a huge spiderweb in the old shed at the back of my garden. Soon, that shed will be replaced by a more welcoming little garden house — hopefully with a more confortable place to write. I spent a long time observing the tiny spiders under the eaves, sitting on my bench, wondering what I could write about. This morning, I woke up with a word in my mind: Al- Ankabut . I didn’t even remember what it meant. I looked it up, reopened the Qur’an, and reread the Surah. O

There’s a road I used to walk often. It wasn’t remarkable, just the same path I took when returning from long journeys—dust on my shoes,...