Garden of Love

I fell in love with the tangled jungle gardens of the Panamanian rainforest.

Not the manicured garden, ordered and contained, but the wild garden—the vines entwining, leaves tumbling over one another, branches reaching toward the sky, everything growing together in glorious abundance.

And then there is the light.

In Panama, sunlight finds its way through even the densest canopy. It arrives in sudden shafts of brilliance, illuminating a leaf here, a vine there, turning ordinary green momentarily into something extraordinary.

Sometimes the leaves seem almost like stained glass—emerald, jade and luminous green held against flashes of blue sky, while sunlight pours through them in great shafts of gold.

I began to think of the rainforest as a Cathedral of Light.

There are no walls.
No ceiling.
No stained-glass windows made by human hands.

Instead, the trees become the architecture. The canopy becomes the vaulted roof. Leaves become windows. Birdsong becomes music. And sunlight becomes illumination.

Garden of Love grew from this experience of looking into the tangled abundance and discovering something sacred there.

I wanted the painting to retain that feeling of being inside the jungle rather than standing outside observing it. There is no neat horizon and no single place for the eye to rest. Greens overlap greens. Vines wander through the composition. Pale blue marks appear and disappear. Gold flickers through the foliage like sunlight caught for an instant before moving somewhere else.

Nothing is perfectly ordered, and yet somehow everything belongs.

Perhaps that is what I love most about the rainforest.

Its beauty comes from its wildness, complexity and interconnectedness.

One plant reaches for another. Old leaves fall and nourish new life. Vines climb trees to reach the sun. Shadow makes the shafts of light seem even more brilliant. Life grows upon life.

And within all that glorious entanglement, beauty keeps appearing.

Painting in my chapel studio surrounded by this landscape has changed the way I see nature. Increasingly, I don’t experience the jungle merely as scenery.

I experience it as sanctuary.

A living cathedral.

A garden in which light continually transforms the ordinary into something sacred.

Garden of Love is my celebration of that discovery—the feeling of looking upward through a tangled Panamanian garden and finding myself surrounded by beauty, mystery and light.

Leaves like stained glass.
Trees like cathedral columns.
The canopy alive with shafts of gold.
And everywhere, life reaching toward the light.

Perhaps we don’t always have to search for the sacred.

Sometimes we simply have to notice that we are already standing inside it.