E. Barrie Kavasch - The Medicine Wheel Garden: Creating Sacred Space for Healing, Celebration, and Tranquillity

T HE MEDICINE WHEEL GARDEN is a guide to creating your personal sacred space and filling it with plants and objects that will offer pleasure and renewal. With American Indian medicine wheels as foundation and inspiration, this book aims to open a new door to garden design that is ancient and modern, healing and spiritual, simple and sophisticated.

A medicine wheel is a central circle, spiral, or cairn of stones from which lines of other stones radiate, often as spokes to an outer circle of stones. Since ancient times, American Indians have created many such arrangements of stones and held them sacred. Planted with healing herbs, the sacred space of a medicine wheel can also become a special kind of garden: a private ecosystem and a small sanctuary for the birds, butterflies, and animals whose natural wild spaces are at risk. Or the medicine wheel garden can take a larger form as a unique community area or even an outdoor classroom.

The creation of sacred spacehow we set apart and arrange a certain spot and imbue it with reverent feelingsis at the core of this book. Whatever our religious beliefs, creating a medicine wheel garden outdoors or a smaller space in the form of an altar inside the home will enhance them. Both draw us closer to nature and native peoples and affirm our personal ties with the earth. However we approach it, the medicine wheel garden can move each of us into new healing and spiritual realms.

In many ways this circle, the Medicine Wheel, can best be understood if you think of it as a mirror in which everything is reflected. The Universe is the mirror of the People, the old teachers tell us (the teachers being Cheyenne ancestors), and each person is a mirror to every other person. Any ideal, person, or object, can be a Medicine Wheel, a mirror for Man. The tiniest flower can be such a mirror, as can a wolf, a story, a touch, a religion, or a mountaintop.

Hyemeyohsts Storm, Seven Arrows, 1972

My own lifelong interest in nature and Native American life-ways has made the medicine wheel garden a powerful magnet for me. Decades ago I visited my first medicine wheel site high in the mountains of southern Colorado and felt an amazing shift in my personal energy. This beneficial, clarifying experience was a felt sense not easily explained, yet exciting and unforgettable.

A few years later, the continuing force of this feeling led me to construct my own private medicine wheel beside a wildflower meadow, where I regularly spent time observing nature. This peaceful site beneath an old apple tree, set in a wild hedgerow near a quiet pool, was not planted with anything, although in time I did move in small patches of various mosses to cover bare ground in shady spots. I would go there daily to pray and meditate, and I would often come away with surprising new clarity about projects I was working on.

Amazing things began to happen in my little sanctuary. Deer and rabbits would sometimes come right up to me while I was meditating there, and curious songbirds always surrounded me. Large flocks of wild turkeys trooped through the meadow daily and headed straight to my medicine wheel.