You are the Gardner

Pulling the roots of the invasive species that were born of seeds dropped long before your birth, you are rewilding your internal landscape. You are practicing with patience a no-mow-May, in which weeds are allowed to flower and unexpected beauty is revealed. What had seemed barren or boring is now luscious and vibrant. Perhaps you mistook others’ tidy rows and manicured lawns as something to strive for, or you could feel the way the people of power would scorn a woman who risked the right to follow her intuitive path.

Your native plants were not permitted to flower and fruit and so you went looking for people who could unearth your natural gifts. You yearned for someone to see you, for someone to walk into your garden, scoop up your soil and exclaim with joy at the wonders they beheld. But how could this happen when you had learned to abandon your own garden in order to admire others? To be the butterfly that visited other landscapes and delighted in their beauty, tasting for a moment the feeling of being noticed and received, but longing for you own rooted experience. 

And now, in this chapter, you are able to claim that, in fact, You are the gardener. 

You are the one who knows where to water, how to listen, where to lay your body against the earth until your breath begins to pulse with the exhale from the trees, and your tears begin to drop like heavy dew rolling off the clingy tip of a broad leaf, and your laughter rolls from your belly to the hungry and grateful earth beneath you.