The first map
The inspiration for this came from a conversation with my psychologist.
In one of our sessions, she was jotting things down. Then she looked up at me and said, “Based on what I've seen so far, we've only scratched the surface.”
The first picture that came to mind was an iceberg. We see the tip; there is so much more underneath. It was an accurate picture of hidden depth, but it did not quite fit. An iceberg is enormous, but it is also still. It waits beneath the water without reaching into anything else.
When I tried to explain my mind, I imagined a brain with plant roots running through it instead. The roots ran deep, but they also ran everywhere. They crossed from one part of my life into another: memory into fear, fear into relationships, relationships into the way I understood myself. There was more to the damage than met the eye, but there was also more life there than the damage alone could explain.
That was the beginning of this version of the garden. The garden itself is not a new idea. I seem to remember it, along with the ocean and raft, surfacing in my mind around 2010 or 2012. It has resurfaced now.
Two landscapes
When the imagery resurfaced, the original image in my head was very clinical: a cross-section of a brain, with roots threading through the tissue. It showed the thing I was trying to describe without softening it. This was not one bad day or one isolated wound. It was a whole living system, with old growth and hidden connections.
The Moon Garden is gentler than that first picture. Under the moon, the roots have become part of a landscape. The brain is no longer an object being examined on a table. It has become somewhere I might enter, walk through and learn to tend.
The gentleness is not an argument that the damage was small. It is a way of making the damage visible without letting it be the only thing visible.
The iceberg remained in my imagination as a polar landscape of frozen water and hidden mass. The garden grew somewhere else, a flourishing island far away. The iceberg is the image of what I feared was beneath the surface: enormous, cold and difficult to reach. The garden is what I found when I looked far past it.
The voyage
The garden represents my mind across time: my school years, my university years, when I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital, and my state of mind after weeks of therapy. That work continues now, as we've started pruning away the plants that don't belong.
By the time I was admitted, I knew the crisis intimately. I knew less about what had made it possible. In that image, I was on a tiny raft.
My psychiatrist is something like the onboard doctor, while my psychologist is in the crow's nest, mapping the seascape and noticing what I might miss. I take on the role of captain, working with the map and a slightly unreasonable collection of instruments: a sextant to check our position, dividers with two pointy bits to measure distances, and a drawing compass with one pointy bit and a pencil lead to mark things out.
I partner with them to explore the vast ocean of my mind, while I choose where to go. As we navigate, we reinforce the raft, turning it into something much bigger and much stronger. Eventually, we found a lush island. Weeks of therapy did not reveal one neat explanation. The roots were already there; therapy helped me map them: old pain, habits, fears and parts of myself I had left unattended. Some needed pruning. Some were still helping me live.
The garden holds both the mind I brought to the hospital and the mind I am learning to tend now. It contains the roots that had grown around everything, but it also contains the possibility that something can be cared for once it has been seen.
The roots
Those roots run across everything.
They run through everything I care about: my interests, my dreams, my relationships and the way I understand myself. This is why one subject rarely stays in one place. A song can open a memory. A memory can change the meaning of a dream. A conversation can make an old image look different. The roots do not respect the borders I draw on paper.
That entanglement can be exhausting. It can make a small disturbance feel as though it has travelled through the entire landscape. But it also explains why care in one place can matter somewhere else. Water reaches further than the patch where it is poured.
There is no single root responsible for everything. Roots do not grow that neatly. They tangle, disappear into the soil and send out new shoots, until everything is lush and sometimes overgrown. Naming one does not untangle the rest.
Perhaps therapy is not the excavation of one buried answer. Perhaps it is learning the shape of the garden well enough to move through it without mistaking every overgrown path for a dead end.
What the garden reveals
The garden reveals what continues beneath the visible surface. It allows damage, roots, new growth and overgrowth to occupy the same landscape. Unlike the Ruins, which surveys what has fallen, this image asks what is still living, spreading, entangled or beginning to bloom.
The hero is gentler than the original cross-section of a brain threaded with roots. That translation softened the image without making it less honest. The moonlit garden can express something the clinical image could not: that the mind beneath examination is not only a site of damage, but a living place I still inhabit.
The island
The garden is not a before-and-after picture. It is a living place, changing through seasons, weather and care. Nothing in it needs to be untouched to belong there. A plant can grow around a stone. A path can disappear and be found again. New growth can appear beside a bruise in the soil.
That is what the image lets me say about myself. I can still be hurt, confused or tired and still be alive in ways I cannot yet measure. The roots do not tell me whether the garden is good or bad. They tell me it is alive: growing, spreading and changing. Something is still taking in water. Something is still reaching for light.
The moonlight matters too. It is not the full brightness of day, and it does not show every detail. It gives enough light to see where I am standing. For a long time, that was all I could manage: not a solution, just enough visibility for the next step.
New horizons
“We've only scratched the surface” lit me up when I first heard it. I remember thinking: yes, finally someone gets it. I had already started mapping my mind; I had been living in it for a long time. I just needed someone else to see it. Even way back, around 2012, I remember thinking: “There's a lot to unpack, we're going to have so much fun!” That thought has resurfaced now.
The garden has changed the sentence for me. Beneath the surface there is still pain, but there are also histories, instincts, questions, habits, hopes and pieces of a self that survived without being noticed. I am always excited to look deeper. There is always something new to find, and too much of it to take in all at once.
The offers a different kind of exploration. I could work with an ice pick and an ice auger—the big screw used to bore holes through thick ice—and measure the hidden mass beneath the water.
The garden gives me somewhere to go. I can follow the roots or dig around in the soil. I can learn what is growing. I can decide what needs support, what needs space and what may need to be removed carefully. I can return when the path becomes too dark.
I am not finished discovering what is underneath. I may never be. A living garden is not a problem that can be solved and closed. It is a place that asks for attention again and again.
But it is mine.
The roots run deep. They run across everything. And somewhere among them, something is still growing. Far away, the iceberg remains: cold, immense and waiting to be explored.
Maybe we set our sights on continents—or maybe even . I can be a space pirate, sailing between islands and stars like something out of Treasure Planet. When we go to space, I hope to bring my trusty crew with me.
Who knows what else there is to explore?!!!