Gardening As Language For The World Soul
As a child, I had recurring dreams with a theme of being enclosed, captured and without a voice,
unheard.
One in particular involved a doorway from the back porch to the garage. It was sunlit in the morning, but in the late afternoon, a shadow would cast on the doorway concealing a large sticky spider web. In the dream, I would run to the doorway toward my mother and become ensnared in the sticky web. Just as I’d open my mouth to scream, I’d hear the door to the house shut behind my mother. A scream would build up in me, but it couldn’t be expressed and it couldn’t be heard. At the moment when I realized it was just me and the spider web and we’d have to work it out alone, I’d wake up.
The feeling of belonging to the spiders and not to my mother would cling to me the whole day.
I would throw myself outside to be with my kin; the tender dewey grass, scrub oak and fir, townsend moles, and jerusalem crickets. When I felt into the form of my mother, I didn’t find resonance. When I felt into the form of insects, plants and animals, I felt a familiar.
The meaning we make of the world comes through our senses.
For each of us, our array of primary sense-making is a little different. We may gather information from the world through our auditory sense, but it may not store in the files of long term memory that way. Our senses may be trained to retreat or be dimmed according to our environment and across generations insensitivity can become the norm where domination prevails. In the example of my recurring dream, I was storing traumatic memory kinesthetically and visually. I was regenerated by the sounds and smells of dew, oak, fir, mole holes, and jerusalem crickets. In a literal sense, my nervous system was in a state of arousal from the dream through my visual and kinesthetic senses. In a state of overwhelm, my young self would wisely seek wholeness in the natural world by balancing with auditory and olfactory senses. The grass, oak, fir, moles and crickets were simply my guides back to the wisdom I already belonged to- that of the world soul.
As a young person, yet untrained to ignore the call to wilding, I found stasis, integration, interconnection by just following my innate sense to step outside and smell the air. As I grew into a teen, this was trained out of me and I was lucky enough to enlight upon mentors who could guide me back to my wild and wise state after I became a mother myself.
Our soul can be trusted to navigate to wholeness. Integration is our natural state.
Wholeness and integration are not a given in the post-industrial capitalocene, in fact they have to be fought for. Divide and conquer is the dominant theme in every field from medicine to religion to science. It is a tool of thought, an egrogore that was born of colonization and continues to haunt the developed world largely unchecked.
The world soul is in need of healing
So what does this have to do with gardening? Well, everything! Centuries of othering, oppression, slavery, and rampant consumption of public environmental resources has led to gross economic accumulation for a few at the cost of the majority and the earth upon which we all depend. Gardening connects us with the world soul. It is a language with which we can hear and be heard, make and be made, heal and be healed. Gardening is how we experience self-sufficiency and generosity with two of the most political and essential things in America today: food and medicine.
Here are three presuppositions I hold:
Gardening connects us with all that is life giving, therefore it heals us and heals the world soul.
Gardening heals the planet. Soil is the climate solution
Gardening is an art. Art itself is nature. We are nature. We are art.
I call these presuppositions rather than beliefs for a couple of reasons. First of all, I want to be a part of living and acting on the solutions to our climate and social crises. It starts with how we think about the solutions, not just what we think they are. Fundamentalist thinking is what got us into this mess and it is characterized by rigid capital T truth, finite linear time, in-group and out-group distinctions. Calling these elemental ideas & presuppositions honors that they could change, that they may have been true throughout deep time, that they could become the egregores of the future. So I am living these elemental ideas now, not as a political agenda backed by verified outcome analysis, but as a lifeway woven by our ancestors that has in fact survived through pandemics, political uprisings, colonial violence, economic depressions and environmental disasters precisely because it is the strongest thread in the weaving of our world. When my heart is on fire and my legs are shaking from the collapsing of this system that was designed to fail, holding that thread is what allows me to stay with the trouble. I hope you will cast onto this weaving with me.