NOT Your Typical Gardening Story

A faëry-hearted exploration of sensitivity, cultivation, sustainability, patriarchy, destruction, and interconnection.

To Feel or Not To Feel

I’m not a natural gardener.

My friends with green thumbs revel in this season, settling seedlings into the earth and pulling weeds without a care. As the growing season continues, they lovingly tend their plants, showing off tiny, tender fruits as they sprout.

When it comes time to harvest, their vines are rich and dripping with nutrients. They casually pluck something luscious to feed to me as we stroll through the fruits of their labor. All through the summer, their table is laden with the bounty of the land.

I envy those people… but I’m not made that way.

You might think I don’t have a knack for understanding what plants need to grow.

It’s not that.

The greening things speak to me—probably in the same way that they speak to those who lovingly tend gardens every year.

… But the plants aren’t the only ones who speak to me!

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When I go out to work the soil, I have two choices—

1. Allow myself to be sensitive, connected with the land and its creatures, listening to the cacophonous chorus of voices and opinions that occur when I start meddling as profoundly as one must to garden.

2. Turn off my senses and invoke a mugglish way of being, finding little joy in growing things but accomplishing the work of gardening without feeling like a vengeful god destroying whatever ecosystem was there before I arrived.

In the past, I waffled between the two, turning off my senses in the spring when it came time to pull the May weeds but unable to maintain dissociation through the summer.

After many tangled, overgrown attempts to imitate the wonderful experience my green-thumb friends seem to be having, I gave up on gardening altogether.

Then last year, my husband and I moved to house in the country on the edge of the forest. As spring blossomed, I felt the garden calling to me…

Getting My Hands Dirty

So here I am—knees in the soil, spade in my hand, narrating this post into my headset, and all around me the ants are in a sheer panic! The caterpillars are whispering to their friends that a giant has arrived, and the weeds are laughing at me, because—well, they don’t care what I do… this is their land.

I may be regretting this already.

My two year-old daughter calls from across the yard, “Mama, I found a ca’pillar”. It should be a sweet moment, but it reminds me of the caterpillar I just killed. I look over my shoulder to the broken egg sac in the bushes nearby—the tiny, hungry green monsters are everywhere.

Why do I feel like I’m at war? I hate killing things.

I wonder where all the gardening joy I’m supposed to feel is.

The truth—my faëry heart wasn’t built for this.

I long to simply talk to all the creatures of the forest and field without asking them to be different. There’s a deep part of my soul that remembers singing to the trees until they offered their fruit.

Here, in my little garden bed, I feel like a titan who has come to destroy worlds.

Turning over the soil so I can plant what I want… diligently killing anything that would compete for nutrients… and then claiming the spoils for my own… feels like rape and pillage.

In ages past, before the plow, the Mother Goddess ruled the hearts of humans. It was sometime around the development of agriculture that patriarchy began to seep into our minds and hearts.

Here in the garden—rake in hand—I feel the entire history of the Earth replaying in the way the ants flee for their lives. I feel the callous my heart must grow to put my needs above those of the other creatures. Somewhere deep down, I know that this callous is what makes possible the atrocities humans perpetrate daily.

Now I’ve had a lot of conversations with those green-thumb friends I mentioned, and none of them has ever had this experience with gardening.

Gardening brings them closer to nature. It helps them feel connected—it adds, rather than removes empathy from the equation.

I don’t know whether to be envious or simply confused.
I seem to be made differently.

The ants are still scurrying around in a panic. They’d clearly made a home underneath this garden bed, and I destroyed it. I can feel their fear and anger… but there’s nothing they can do. They’re powerless against me. I can destroy their home with impunity.

One of them bit me to let me know how they felt about the carnage. Physically, I brushed it off; it didn’t even phase me. Yet as I pull this rake across the soil, exploring my feelings of tyranny… I can’t help but think that little ant is the reason I avoid gardening.

A Blessing and a Curse

I don’t always know how to live in the modern world.

The ability to speak with and understand the creatures of the natural world is often a gift, but there are times when it feels like a curse.

As a child, I remember learning that plastic would take millions of years to disintegrate—that it would essentially always be with us—and I simply couldn’t understand why everyone was okay with that. I still don’t understand… but I’ve (mostly) learned to accept the way things are.

I like to think of myself as eco-sensible. I shop secondhand and reuse what I can. I choose products that are compostable and sustainable whenever possible, but I’m also a modern woman.

How do we balance a deep sense of connection with the natural world with the way humans live in the 21st century?

We all have to decide how much to participate in the destruction.

I wish I didn’t feel like I was destroying a magical living world of tiny creatures whenever I till the garden. I try to tell myself it’s my garden. But I can’t muster a feeling of ownership. I’m just not built that way.

Maybe I saw Pocahontas too many times as a child…

🎵 *sings* 🎵
You think you own whatever land you land on
The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim
But I know every rock and tree and creature
Has a life, has a spirit, has a name. 🎵

While I’ve often been accused of living in a Disney movie, it’s obvious to see that since the moment when humans first learned to cultivate the land, we’ve been playing out the same age-old drama.

—>I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas…

How do you live with all the things that—as one of my dear friends says—hurt your feelings?