cultivate ur own garden

lately i can't stop listening to haley henderickx's oom sha la la and the words "i need to start a garden" echo in my head like a repetitive and gutural war call. 

i'm throwing out the milk
the olives got old
i'm tired of my mind getting heavy with mold
i need to start a garden
i need to start a garden
i need to start a garden
i need to start a garden

i've been reading 'civilization and its discontents' by freud. i swear i'm not bringing up freud just for the sake of it. he talks about happiness, how our search of it moves in two axis: seaking out pleasure, and avoiding pain. but there's many things, outside of our control, that bring us pain, the main one being our culture and the way it surpresses our most basic instincts. how do we deal with this discomfort? we take drugs. we isolate ourselves. we fall into religion. but it's speaking about this desperate evasion that freud mentions candide by voltaire. 

what a beautiful, fleeting book. reading it at 18 changed my mind. voltaire replies to leibniz's generalist declaration that 'we live in the best world possible' by ironically creating candide: a young man, eternally optimistic, that navigates life's darkest turbulences with a smile. by the end, beaten up and finally discouraged, he comes across a simple man living with his daughter, completely isolated from the world and fully dedicated to the care of his garden. by the end of the book, to his partner's pangloss contant philosophizing of life, he simply responds 'il faut cultiver notre jardin' [let's cultivate our garden]. that, says freud, is another form of distraction. you cultivate your own garden, away from the world. that's what you do when you feel like your mind is getting heavy with mold. 

is mine? cultivating my own garden - in all its meanings - somehow feels like the answer to everything. there's something so gentle and honest about taking slow and thoughtful care of another living thing, one that doesn't move or speak or try to fix itself obsessively. i have this profound certainty that i would be a lot better off if only i would resemble a plant more. taking care of them, in my own little beautiful garden, seems like a good first step.

freud also talks about an 'oceanic feeling', a term coined by his friend romain rolland, which refers to a 'sensation of eternity'. freud himself admits to not understanding it; some people seem to have it while some others don't. that's the feeling often associated with the drive to religion, to making trascendental and spiritual sense of a feeling that can't possibly be explained. i've never been religious, but i do think of myself as spiritual, in some way. but where is this oceanic feeling? where does it reside, does it mean, does it do? how can something so mine feel so impossible to know. perhaps like in the moon europa, orbiting jupter, this oceanic feeling hides underneath a thick all encompassing layer of ice. perhaps, just like with euriopa, we can only theoerize but never fully know what hides underneath it.