For Love, Turn Around

Facing the Flowers in Fleetwood Mac’s “Running Through the Garden”

Sometimes words fail us. We have access to multiple languages, tones of voice, volume variations, punctuation, idioms and other linguistic tools to express ourselves, but there is a part of the human experience that simply cannot be captured by our words, whether written or spoken. I love words, but words alone are so limited in this way. Our feelings bleed outside the lines of our alphabets, so we need other means to channel even strands of them. Music is one of these art forms. It can function as a kind of escape, a form of entertainment, and an auditory experience of the sometimes chaotic storm of wordless emotions that collect in our minds. I think that’s one of the appeals of listening to the same song over and over once we’ve landed on one that just clicks with what we’re feeling. For me, it feels like I’ve finally accessed something I can’t explain; and even though words comprise the lyrics, it’s more than words. 

For a while this particular Fleetwood Mac track - “Running Through the Garden” - became a sort of Siren song for me, drawing me back again and again with just the right mood and lyrics that I felt bore some truth to what I was feeling but couldn’t quite put into my own words. The song is captivating and a little cryptic, and I didn’t really know what to make of it; I just knew it was exactly how I felt. That’s the beauty of a good song; it can give voice to something that words alone can’t express. I recommend you listen to the song before reading so you can kind of know what I mean when I try to translate this feeling into something tangible.

“Running Through the Garden” is the eleventh track on Fleetwood’s album Say You Will, and it shares the simultaneously universal and personal reflective lens that defines much of their discography. Stevie Nicks provides the lead vocals to lyrics that feature a “she” along with her first person speaker. I like to imagine it as Nicks speaking to herself just as any of us would when it seems that we see our lives racing forward as a spectacle rather than something within our control to manage. In my mind, “Running Through the Garden” is a beautiful nightmare, a glimpse of both clarity and confusion from the perspective of someone who recognizes the destructive path she is on and doesn’t quite understand how to solve it all. That’s a feeling I know well. 

So there are a few things going on in this song. There’s running; there’s a garden filled with poisonous flowers; and there’s the relationship between the speaker and the woman running through the garden. There’s also some unique diction that I’ve tried to make sense of for my personal interpretation. Nicks starts out with the lines Until she herself became the deadliest poison, as she grew older. Oh, until she herself became just as fatal as was her garden. I love the idea of a garden being this realm of toxicity, because gardens have so many connotations that work for addiction. They seem like these beautiful spaces in which we can grow good things, beautiful things; and they are. But that’s only when we tend to them well. Gardens are enclosed spaces that can grow whatever we plant in them, but when we don’t know what we’re planting or how to tend to them properly, they can grow out of our control and contain life beyond our knowledge and capacity to control. So the woman in this song, in a fatal garden of her own making, who has become just as poisonous as this garden, embodies the idea that in addiction, we do become just as toxic spiritually as the poison we consume. Even if trauma pushes us into this garden in the first place, our continued time in the isolated space of addiction creates such isolation and despair that we no longer need the substance to which we’re addicted to inflict harm on ourselves. Our minds have learned to do that on their own even while not under the influence. 

This imagery resonates deeply with our relationship with substances in addiction. We wander into a space that seems like a haven from our other issues and anxieties when we choose to use alcohol - or another substance - as a solution for anything from basic boredom to social anxiety to crippling PTSD. Whatever the reason we enter this garden, the results play out in the same fashion. The cycle we slip into of trigger-action-relief-need pulls us deeper into a garden whose plants continue to grow taller and more deadly with time. And the plants are alive with a force we don’t determine, even if we were the agents responsible for picking out the seeds that produced them. Surrounded by this much poison and becoming infected ourselves, we do the only thing we know and we flee in the same way we tried to escape by entering the garden in the first place. 

Nicks sings, And so you run toward what you know is wrong; this first part of the refrain has a grim resolution in it as it surfaces again and again throughout the song. This is the refrain that runs through our minds in those times when we see that we are surrounded by a self-grown jungle of poison. We know continuing on the same path might be wrong, but it’s also the only solution we know, so we run. Running means continuation of the cycle, plunging deeper into addiction and into a garden that has become unmanageable with the grim determination that this is the only course of action available to us. The refrain continues, there are too many flowers to cut down. The poisonous flowers are the sum of every issue that has ever arisen or intensified as a result of choosing to step deeper into addiction. They may not even seem directly connected to drinking, but their roots all connect beneath the surface visible to us. My flowers looked like broken relationships, depression and anxiety, shame over my appearance or actions, regrettable communications, harm done to others, stress from work, self-inflicted injuries and parasitic intrusive thoughts. From one perspective, they can look like a handful of unrelated problems that coincided spectacularly to the point of disaster, but a deeper look reveals their shared soil and the intertwined roots beneath it that only I really knew about even if I wouldn’t admit to it. And because I couldn’t admit to myself the simple root of the hundreds of toxic flowers in my life, I despaired that there were too many to cut down. I failed to see that cutting down one thing - my choice to drink - would be the first step in diminishing the height that all those other problems had in my life. 

The other part of the refrain implores the running to stop: For the love I have for your life, for the love I have for your life, turn around. It’s a request made out of love and entreating a change for the sake of that love. Nicks isn’t asking her to stop though; she’s saying turn around, an action that necessitates stopping but accomplishes something more. For the woman in the garden, turning around involves refocusing her direction and addressing the chaos of flowers she has been fleeing. 

Turning around means we can’t just stop drinking and erase all past actions and current problems from our lives. We have to turn around and look at our lives, look at the resentments we’ve accumulated and the harm we’ve caused, and do something about it. I think it takes a lot of courage to do that, to willingly choose to surrender our attempt to escape the monsters we fear and face them head on. The courage we need to do so often stems from the realization that we’re attempting to flee something that has infested us and become inescapable in doing so. The woman in this song has reached that point, having become just as fatal as her garden. Some part of her conscious self recognizes the futility in trying to escape something that is an extension of herself, and this is Nicks’ voice, begging her to stop for the love that her conscious self has for the whole of herself. It’s weird to think that we can love ourselves and hate ourselves, and that the part of us that issues this love or enmity is innately connected to the recipient of this feeling. We perceive and value parts of ourselves - our bodies, abilities, senses, movements, accomplishments, mannerisms, etc. We can also see how our addiction negatively affects these aspects of self, and our addiction can alter the ways in which our minds perceive our whole selves. There is still some level that holds love for the whole self despite it all, the part most intimately connected to our higher power. And when we can access that self through conscious contact with God, we can tap into the deep love that He has for us and that we can have for ourselves as creations of God. This is the love that asks us to stop running and turn around, to pause and accept this love and find a way back to the state of conscious connection we’ve fallen, tumbled and run from. 

The speaker adds a sort of apology to her entreaty: Never did I mean to imprison you here in my garden, like I am imprisoned. Even though trauma and other outside factors lead us into addiction, we’re ultimately our own jailors. The word ‘imprison’ is great here, because it reflects the reality of addiction so well. The word itself derives from a Latin judicial term for the enslavement of a debtor to his creditor, and it’s an accurate description of our relationship with a substance we choose to bring into our lives but because of which we accumulate incredible debt over time. We never intend for this result, and when we finally realize that our body, mind and spirit all suffer from the accrued debt, it’s too late for us to easily extricate ourselves from the situation. It often seems impossible to escape such a great debt, so we continue running even though we carry the thing from which we run with us. 

The next verse reflects on the experience of finally recognizing this dilemma: Until she herself understood her garden, leaving her heart broken, no future at all. Until she herself became the toxic garden, always frightened, no future at all. The repetition of no future at all in this verse reflects the state of hopelessness we enter when we realize the hold alcohol has on us. We know that running can only be a futile running away instead of running toward, because we have nothing to run for in this cycle of addiction. If we finally have some understanding of the situation, we can see that our path is a steep, harmful slope to sure ruin. This idea of becoming the toxic garden echoes Satan’s lament in Paradise Lost: “which way I fly am Hell, myself am Hell” (Milton). Even if we can see that the great adversary in our lives is actually us, the perpetuator of our addiction, we do not have the capacity or insight to save ourselves from ourselves. It’s a terrifying realization, one that makes it impossible to really turn around and address the change that needs to be made without some higher power in our lives. 

The song continues with repeated verses echoing that same entreaty to turn around and the same sorrowful apology for imprisoning her whole self. There is no resolution, only the recognition that she knows the wrong in where she runs and a final imploration to turn around. 

Running through the garden is a chaotic visual. It reflects the desperation of struggling to keep moving forward even in addiction, even when we know we’re running toward the inevitability of destruction or death. We don’t stop because we struggle to find perspective on our problems;  while in active addiction, we can’t see clearly that these problems are not individual monsters but rather a toxic garden whose life is rooted in a common problem that we can only resolve when we turn around to surrender. 

Many lyrics written by Nicks draw from works of literature to which she felt particularly drawn. “Running Through the Garden” was inspired by a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, a Gothic tale called Rappaccini’s Daughter. The story tells of a man with a garden of poisonous plants; his daughter, Beatrice, raised to tend to this garden, develops an immunity to the poison and becomes toxic herself. The daughter’s touch becomes poisonous to other humans, and the great tragedy is that she dies not because of the poison itself, but because of a lack of true love. Her poison infects the man who wants to love her, and she dies because he cannot accept her in all her brokenness and fails to see the beauty and good that remain in her in spite of her condition. In the story, fear prohibits her suitor from accepting Beatrice and truly loving her. Beatrice dies, and her suitor remains alone and poisoned himself. There’s a bit more to the story, but this is a quick recap of some pertinent plot. Nicks’ lyrics take pieces of this story and place them in the wider landscape of feelings and experience generated by the music medium. We hear the desperate situation of the poisoned runner and the love available to her if she can turn around. Hawthorne’s story involves men who take advantage of or fail to understand the experience of the woman in the garden, and we will almost certainly encounter similar people in our lives. People who fail to see past our poisoned selves or use our weakness to their advantage. They complicate the trajectory of our recovery because their place in our lives brings more poison than the love we need to turn around and recover. Fleetwood Mac’s song not only explores the mindset that urges further running into the garden; it proposes an outcome other than ruin if only the runner can make a change for the sake of love. We don’t see this other outcome though, only fragments of a potential tragedy that can feel all too real for those of us who know the terror of running through such a garden.

I don’t know exactly what to make of the continued use of the preposition until at the beginning of Nicks’ verses. Nicks doesn’t seem to provide a clause that would make these verses grammatically complete sentences and answer the question until what? We’re left with a collection of incomplete sentences mixed with direct addresses to the woman running. One result of this lyric choice is that it leaves us with an unfinished comprehension of what happens when this woman in the song becomes the poison and understands her garden and herself. The repeated until’s present the experiences of recognition and despair, and the point of no return sort of mindset that we can reach in addiction. What happens when we finally look in the mirror and know with no doubt that we’re running in a race toward death and that we have no power to put a stop to on our own? It’s a different experience for each of us; I know that from the connections I’ve made in the program and the stories I’ve heard. But the shared factor in our stories when we’re in recovery and no longer running through the garden of addiction is that we have all experienced an “until moment.” Until - meaning up to a certain point in time or event - implies a habitual practice that reaches some turning point. What we do with the recognition of our own hellish existence depends on our ability to turn around, to look honestly at ourselves and to begin the journey of recovering the state of being we believed was lost to us in the chaos of our garden. The flowers we’re tasked with handling upon this pivot are the resentments, issues, past wrongs, things we let grow wild when we don’t stop and tend to them properly. This is part of the work of recovery, tending to the overgrown flowers. We don’t need to cut them down, but we need to tame them. Until we recognize the love available to us from others, from our higher power, and even from ourselves, we won’t be able to stop running toward what we know is wrong. 

We run with this urgency and misguided direction while in active addiction, but I find myself slipping into that same kind of running sometimes even in recovery. When I had “Running Through the Garden” queued up on repeat for a while, I felt the anxiety of different stressors creeping up to unmanageable heights in my life. The mindset we become so familiar with in addiction still haunts us even without the presence of a physical substance poisoning our bodies, and I’m one of many people in recovery who fall victim to it when I fail to have proper perspective on my reality. It still seems easier to run away when I feel that urgent chorus of too many flowers, so I run toward what is wrong: not alcohol anymore, but isolation or an attempt to ignore feelings and circumstances that require tending. When we write inventory on the various resentments, fears and conducts that come between us and others and our higher power, we practice turning these things around and looking at our role in them. That’s a big part of the fourth step in the program too: turning around the feelings or actions in our lives that have weighed so heavily on us because we felt helpless, victimized or justified in our resentment. By turning these experiences around, we shift the focus and move toward a practice of placing trust in God and taking action in the right direction rather than what we now know to be wrong.