Blurring the Edges

A pond view at Mt. Cuba Center in Hockessin, DE

While we rounded the native plant gardens at Mt. Cuba Center, walking literally at a snail’s pace and enamored with unfurling ferns and spurts of hidden beauty, our docent Lauri spoke to us about edging. There is the canopy—the vertical forest, the high-up umbrella, the celestial sky touchers, the cloud mates, the trees. They sway in gentle bows and arcs, rustling newly formed leaves. Below the bird nests and owl haunts, lives the forest floor—the blanketed earth dwellers, the lay of the land, the ground lovers, the short-statured panoply, the low cover art. 

As you pan from the trees to the underbrush, your eye might glaze across the neighboring meadow, a wide open space swept with an open-hearted feeling and a smattering of small birds. But go back. Slowly pan backwards to the base of the trees. Right on the outskirts. There. Between the forest and the meadow is an edge. It’s not a hard-stop, but a gradual gradation of vegetation…a whole other habitat. 

At Mt. Cuba, they encourage purposeful edging. The edge of the forest is not manicured and trimmed like a formal garden. It’s more amorphous and subtle. It meanders. It changes. It flows. The gardeners allow an edge to not be an edge. It’s not sharp or cutting or clean. They foster the role of edges as transition, as places in-between. 

Yesterday, while teaching yoga, while shifting my weight forward and back and side-to-side on my feet, I thought about edging. I thought about how I often describe our feet as snow shoes. I use the image to explore the function of feet as easeful weight bearers, wide and long. I imagine my Snow Shoe Feet moving out infinitely in all directions, touching the base of the walls and moving out beyond and beyond. And so, in that moment of shifting weight, edging made sense. There is no hard-stop between the skin of my feet and the surrounding air. There is a much less-definable boundary between “me” and “you.” There is a breathable transition, a slow slope between my body (and what I imagine it to be) and the rest of the world. 

This edge might be an aura. Or energy. Or the prickling of hair standing upright on arms. It could be the breeze or wings or a draping of sunlight. It’s a glow, a blush, a hush. It’s heat rash, a good sweat, and waves of emotion. It’s both a chill and a warming rush. 

My edge is the part of me that reaches out, the part that feels the magic of expanding my arms out into space. That’s not nothing. In fact, it’s everything. Because part of you is standing stock still, watching the cherry blossoms blow in the wind. And part of you is riding the air with them, just out of reach. 

The edge is the part of you that intimately knows the moon and her moods. The part of you that knows the joys and the sorrows of the ocean. 

We can breathe life into our edging, allowing it to be exactly what we need…protection, safety, comfort, peace, possibility, support, strength, buoyancy, uplift, empathy, instinct. We can surround ourselves with the light we emanate. There is no hard-stop between our feet and the floor, between the breeze and the back of your neck. 

Now when I wander through towns and houses and gardens, I see hard-stops everywhere. 

This is my space, that is yours. My land is here, don’t go past this line in the dirt. The path is clean-cut and clear. My mulch is not yours. This is the end of the forsythia, there is no more. The weeping cherry has an embarrassing bowl cut, it can’t reach out in surprising tendrils. The boxwood can’t brush your legs accidentally. 

And I am looking for softness, empathy. 

I am starting to think about what thrives in my in-between spaces, in my edges as they blur. I am thinking about my edges as I approach you with the wind moving through open palms. 

Shadows loom large over the underbrush at Mt. Cuba