I fell head over heels, in pitter-patter love with the garden I tend
I hope you will too
I fell in pitter-patter love with the land that is a small backyard garden, in the middle of a city. My heart actually does the thing when you're in love whenever I perceive her. And while she is not exclusively feminine, there is a feminine quality to a wild-tended garden. That's the kind she is; a wild-tended garden. I made that up. Because that's how it works. We all just get to make stuff up. We don't have to look it up on the internet first to make sure it's right. I just wanted to see what a place would be like if it was wild tended, co-created. And in order to do so I had to learn to allow everything to grow at least a little bit, in order to find out what it's all about.
I remember sitting at my first grown up job feeling like something wasn't right about where I was or what I was doing. I remember reading a self improvement something or another and it asked "what activity did you love most as a child?" as a point of reference for where natural curiosity lives. I remember thinking "nature". I had not a clue what that meant at the time since nature is enormous and so encompassing. What the hell does that even mean? All I knew was as a child I was outside ALL THE TIME. Every single day off and all summer long I was outside roaming around. I was climbin' a tree, collecting rocks, investigating bugs, practicing self-taught from PBS catch-and-release protocols with garter snakes, spinning on tire swings, and watching sprinkler water run like a creek down our shady urban street. I remember one of my favorite things to do was get as close as possible to anything outside and just watch the smallest thing I could find. I still do this because it's humbling to watch an impossibly small creature live on Earth.
And as it turns out, to people like me - who are, shall we say, divergent in perspective - the impossibly small is as important as anyone else. Life is not a hierarchy, it's a spiral. We are here to share, not "win". There is no one better or greater than anyone else, macro or micro. Why? Because we all came up TOGETHER in this time and space. All of us. Humans and everyone else. We came up alongside viruses and bacteria, we came up alongside wild four o'clocks.
: which by the way is a completely inaccurate name because they bloom all day, not just 4 o'clock - so I asked them what they would rather be called and they said "eternal time spirals". I said, "duh" :
We came up alongside water and walnuts, cows and copper, stars and stones. We came up alongside them all. We would not be who we are without them, and they, not without us. We've all helped shape each other. We are co-habitants, co-creators in this world.
So, I realized I wanted to be in nature/garden my whole life. It was just not something I could ever quite figure out. I had the desire, but now as an adult, every time I went outside to do something - I would have a horrible experience. I mean horrible. Camping trip nightmares, flooded creek canoes mishaps, chiggers every single time I would go outside in our yard, sunburn, exhaustion, twig lash. It was all there. I even fell flat on my face, sprained an ankle, and nearly broke my hand. No matter what nature I found myself, I was getting raked. This paired with other childhood experiences where my father openly detested all outdoors, even the kind that's super malled-out for humans, was a recipe for distance as an adult. He hated being outside and he was vocal about it. So naturally there was a divide between being a kid outside and being an adult outside, and I noticed. This assisted in veiling my perspective of nature for many years.
Turns out those same veiled years, I also happened to be a miserable. I was negative, critical, and most of the time, at least a little drunk. And so that's all life was. Drinking and being miserable. Thinking I had all the answers and wondering why no one else could see things "my" way. This was how I was with nature too. And so nature enjoyed reminding me in her various ways, I was indeed not in charge nor in control of anyany other myself. I couldn't have possibly known the lesson at the time. All I knew was I had a desire that was pretty huge and every time I went for said desire I would end up having such a terrible experience, I would not try again for a while.
The thing about those super strong desires though, they are persistent. They don't go away. And things become increasingly more difficult the more you ignore those feelings.
My desires to garden persisted enough I began trying to learn about the dumb chiggers, since they were my perceived greatest threat. What predated on chiggers? Why were there so many? Was there something I could do to curb those bites!? And the more I learned about this the more I began to understand something new, there was a whole eco-system out there and if one creature was creating so many problems there was something out of balance. And so I began to learn about chiggers and chiggers led me to learn about nematodes (and nematodes led me to learn more about tap water and soil, which led me to the next) which are tiny creatures in the soil. And nematodes love to eat chigger larva, and also nematodes can be easily killed off because the water we use from the tap has too much chlorine for the little dudes to survive. So, with chlorinated water killing all my 'todes, there was no one to eat the chigger larva and they went ape.
So it was, ever so slowly year after year at my own home, I began to look at the yard as a completely new place, an entity unto their own. And upon reflection it's pretty cool now to see this obstacle or challenge which presented itself to me over and over was actually an opening to walk through in order to see the world in a new way. And ever since then I stay curious about the challenges I face, most especially in the garden. None of the issues which plagued me before do so now, because now I'm paying so much more attention.
I want to know more by allowing. I want to learn from what is, so that I can make better decisions about being here on Earth. There is obviously some order here, though still a puzzle, because while we do know a lot, there is still plenty we don't. And the brilliance of what we don't know, is all the solutions we need for the problems we have, are also here. And we can bring them here through our love for our garden.
P.S. I read today that lush green spaces like the garden I tend, act like acupuncture for the communities they find themselves and now I’m even more obsessed. Let’s all do some Earth acupuncture and get some plants growing!