I am asleep, but my heart is awake, my beloved knocks,
“Open for me, my sister, my darling,
My dove, my perfect-one,
For my head is filled with dew,
My locks with droplets of the night.”
- SONG OF SONGS
The title names the central image of the series: a garden that is not a place in nature, nor merely a decorative symbol. In the biblical Song of Songs, the beloved appears through springtime, fragrance, the gazelle or stag, the dove, the enclosed garden, and the sealed fountain; and in later Jewish and Christian interpretation, this poem of human love became one of the great scriptural sources for speaking of divine love and the relation between God and humankind.
St. John of the Cross stands within that inheritance: his Spiritual Canticle is one of the major Christian poems of the soul’s search for the Beloved, and his mystical poetry is widely understood as expressing union between the soul and Christ. The “inner garden” belongs to a long symbolic tradition in which inward life is figured as a place of enclosure, fertility, vulnerability, visitation, and transformation.
This is one of the deepest truths of mystical art: revelation is often known first through transfiguration. One does not see the source directly; one sees that the world is no longer the same. St. John of the Cross gives this drama its great Christian lyric form when the soul questions groves, meadows, and living things, asking whether the Beloved has
passed by.
Nature is no longer background; it becomes the place where absence itself begins to speak. From here, The Inner Garden opens into a larger field of companionship. Rumi belongs to another religious and poetic tradition, yet his presence is relevant here because he is also one of the great mystics of longing and separation transformed into song. In the Persian mystical tradition, flowers, birds, and the movements of the natural world become participants in spiritual desire. In this series, natural elements such as animals, wind, and birds guide the soul onward, becoming part of the soul’s education in desire.
Why, after wounding
This heart, have You not healed it?
And why, after stealing it,
Have You thus abandoned it,
And not carried away the stolen prey?
- ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS
If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead, don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.
Like this. Like this.
When someone asks what it means
to “die for love,” point here.
- RUMI
The Inner Garden belongs to this mode of knowing. It does not claim mastery over its sources. It enters them intuitively and reverently, as an exploration. It works from the conviction that art can become a place where thought ripens into vision, and vision into a kind of inward hearing.
In this light, the fountain becomes the spiritual center of the cycle. In the Song of Songs, the enclosed garden and sealed fountain belong to the beloved’s hidden abundance; in these paintings, the soul is led toward that source by wind, birds, and the living intelligence of the garden itself. There is searching, questioning, and even dialogue with creatures along the way. When the soul enters the fountain where it perceives the deer,
what was first glimpsed is now encountered in depth, at the source, where longing becomes encounter.
Teilhard de Chardin helps articulate the wider horizon of that transformation. He was a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and paleontologist, known for thinking of evolution as a movement toward greater synthesis and final spiritual unity. For him, the divine is not absent from the material cosmos but draws creation toward fulfillment from within. He cannot be folded into the same symbolic tradition as St. John or Rumi, but he does
offer a language for one of the deepest intuitions behind this series: that creation is not inert, that there is an inward energy in things, and that nature itself may be read in terms of attraction, union, and transformation. With Teilhard, the garden can be seen not only as the soul’s inward enclosure but also as a microcosm of a more universal movement, where life tends toward relation, deepening, and convergence.
The Inner Garden is therefore not simply a cycle about private spirituality. It is an exploration of a desire that is at once personal and universal: the longing to find the place where life, beauty, and meaning are not separate; the longing for the hidden source that makes things flower; the longing to discover that what seems most distant may already have entered the soul and left it changed. If these paintings move through
symbols inherited from ancient poetry and mysticism, they do so because such symbols remain alive.
They are among the oldest ways human beings have found to speak of
what reason alone cannot seize: that the world may be more permeated with presence than we know, and that within the soul there may be a garden in which the desire for union is itself the beginning of revelation.