The morning after Thanksgiving Just as a fast-moving storm moves through your town, suddenly Thanksgiving is over. What was that? The house still has traces and tracks, but pretty much it was put back to its original state before being turned upside down, what with stuffed chairs put on the porch to make room for three tables holding eight people. The dining room and living room was wall to wall people, and they moved through the long table of casseroles in the long foyer that runs through the house to connect the 14 foot high rooms. My house is a Great Mother who always has a space for whatever you want to do.

My wife grew up here, you know, so she and her younger sister are always walking through the architecture of their family history. I’m like the Unicorn in the Garden. I was wild in the forest of the world, and the aroma of a virgin flared my nostrils, and I lay my head in her lap and was captured by the town of Blackstone. I tried to escape when I first came here for six years but was given a job writing for the newspaper, and I accepted my Garden and the tree of life growing in the middle.

The Garden blooms with my presence. That’s the great Unicorn myth of the Middle Ages portrayed on the wall tapestries in the New York Art museum. The print here is the final tapestry showing the Unicorn in the flowering garden, returning to the Garden and restoring paradise.

The young people in the family are bringing their gardens and unicorns back the Home Garden. If a woman she brings the unicorn she has just captured, and if a man, he brings his garden to which he is dedicated.

I love this myth. It is my myth. We even named our stained-glass studio the Glass Unicorn.

The unicorn, of course, is a mythical animal, and I just learned watching British documentary on the monarchy, the sacred animal of Scotland. The story of the capture of the unicorn was the great secular myth of the Middle Ages, the underground stream of the European pagan religions before the topsoil of Christianity was laid over this ancient soil.

Notice the phallic horn and the circle, the symbols of male and female principles. Make a circle with your left and put your right finger through it and everyone knows you are talking about unicorns.

But, as you know, I dig down beneath the Christian top soul through the pagan soil beneath to the underground mystical stream beneath both, from which my well-spring of writing pours forth.

What is the virgin, really? The Virgin is the empty mind, the unconditioned, undefined, and questioning mind. Prajna, or wisdom/creative mind cannot resist the aroma of emptiness and it lay its head in the lap of the Virgin. Jesus said the Son of Man has no place to rest its head. And Zen says prajna is the aroused mind that rests on no form or thought, belief or religion even.

So right here you can see the deeper layers of the myth. It Buddhism! Hurrah!

Spiritual practice like meditation and mindfulness empties the mind of attachments, and it becomes empty, but emptiness is form, and form is emptiness, says Zen.

The virgin mind attracts, not what is known, not yesterday’s news, but the creative form, new ideas, insight, the gestalt grasp of the whole situation.

Can you see how the Unicorn and the Garden can become your living myth, something you can work with, something that gives you a story of for you yearning to be free and creative, or as the Buddha says, the cessation of suffering and the laws of old age, sickness and death?

The unicorn it the timeless aspect of you in time, the garden. Or as Jesus says; be in the world (Garden) but not of it (unicorn).