Therapy from the Garden

Panic attacks your pain-porous skin? Imagine the layers of onion, Sufi-circling and circling until there is no tear-making body. If the issue is anorexia, taking starvation’s dark spirit-flight, or anhedonia, running from the skin’s having fun, consider the mushroom’s fleshy erection, and the pumpkins, earth goddesses and rotund Buddhas sprawled by compost’s funky aerosol. For social phobia, desensitize among the rows of corn’s parade, ticker tape leaves and Rasta tassels that wind-strut and bring on the crows’ hop and rap. Too much affect: meditate on potatoes, taciturn as overturned stones. Too little: visualize the hanging tomatoes’ insides, the soft hearts, sentimental ornaments. From the lettuce there is common sense for narcissism: acceptance as side dish, garnish for a meaty sandwich. If that leaf isn’t the dose, there’s always the soil people shovel and level, rake and make wishful with seed, feed leftovers from the compost’s vegan sewer, the soil that wants for nothing and yields and yields.