Song of Solomon 4:16 Meaning Awake

There is a garden within you, the alive inner space of your own presence, and it can be closed or open. To call the winds to blow upon it is to welcome life fully, to stop defending yourself against this moment and let it move through you. When you open in this way, something long held begins to flow, a sweetness that was always there beneath the guarding.

The beloved who comes into the garden is not elsewhere. It is the awareness that inhabits your body when you cease thinking and simply feel yourself being alive. To eat the pleasant fruits is to taste this aliveness directly. Open to the present moment, and the joy the mind kept searching for outside you rises quietly from within.

A garden is a good picture of the inner life, kept private, growing its own fruit in its own time. Here it calls to two opposite winds at once, the cold from the north and the warm from the south, asking both to blow through it. Only when contrary forces are welcomed together does the hidden fragrance rise and pour out.

The beloved who comes to taste the fruit is the inner other, the missing counterpart each of us carries and longs to meet. When the two poles within a person come together, the soul stops guarding itself and begins to give. That meeting is what makes a person fruitful, because the life shut away inside only comes out once the divided halves are joined.