We live in a world where we need to reformulate all of our basic concepts that are crucial for human life: where is our home, where do we belong, what is our aim in life. Local values, traditions become more and more important but its getting even more challenging to get access to them, keep them when more and more people need to flee their countries, families, cities, places of birth. Living isolated from each other and from nature is the worst dystopia I can imagine but unfortunately this is our presence. But the desire is there: grounding and belonging. These are not future slogans: we need to connect and find new ways of getting access to each other, to our traditions, rituals, values and to the ground which makes it possible that we can grow. Globalization is our reality, with all its disadvantages and challenges. But this gives us a lot of potential for exchanges, finding our common resources, shared values. Nature doesn’t have ideas and terms such as nations or countries. We, humans need to find the ways to nature in a way that helps us not just to survive but create a healthy, blossoming life together.

Floating Gardens – Project Laputa

I have a dream, or more practically, a long-term project plan about creating a green place, a Garden, a ´European garden´. I borrowed the idea from Hayao Miyazaki´s beautiful animation film, Laputa, the ´floating garden´. This garden does not belong to a particular country but interconnected; floating above cultures but also embedded into the culture of its physical location. This is a safe place for integration, arrival. A space where people would heal their traumas of migration, can have a rest without being pressed to do anything particular. This garden is a place for work, for learning, for art, for therapy, just for being. A place without labels, without special aims, where people would keep their dignity and respect. A place of a ´floating´ station of silence, place of healing, where people could be energized and empowered. Physical presence, physical work, embodied programs make possible to get back to the inner balance if it has been somehow lost it in the transition, in the long journey in between the old and the future home. Both spiritually and physically this garden would be modeled after medieval cloister gardens, floating between the heavens and the earth, rooted in the soil, but anchored in the universal.

Present

This garden is not a dream anymore. Laputa, translated to practical, is a system of gardens in different countries. The first “Laputa-garden” is in Amsterdam, where I have my urban life, where I raise my child; in a city where I found all the social values I believe in: mutual trust, respect, solidarity and the culture of work. Here I am one of the creators of the SET-community garden; an urban garden for social integration.

Future

My curiosity, creativity and inner drive don’t stop in Amsterdam, I would like to go further to spread this green web and connect all kinds of places. I am looking for (letting myself to find) the next stations for the next possible gardens. In Hungary, where I come from, where my family and friends live and where, I hope, I can channel back my love and creative energies we are starting the HOLD base project to reconnect with nature and for healing. In Puglia, south of Italy in the Campo Paradiso project where I have friends, where I found the energy of the sun and the see; places which used to be a center of ancient Mediterranean civilizations. Somewhere in the North which I don’t know yet, but, I suspect, I can find the energy and strength of untouched nature. And maybe in France or Portugal in hidden medieval gardens where past and present can connect and grow into a beautiful timeless garden.

I am looking for possible partners, who see a practical and methodological opportunity to deploy such a garden in these countries in their current or future projects.

There are some wonderful examples how flowers can give us back hope in life:

• For most of the last five years there has been a small oasis of colour and life amidst the destruction and grief of rebel-held Aleppo. It’s the garden centre, which has supplied plants and blooms and foliage to people in that part of the city throughout the war.