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Falling in Love Harder

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Have you had your heart broken in the garden? I’m not talking about human love – not teddy-bear-chocolates Valentine’s Day love that’s momentary and overly sweet. No, I’m talking total and complete breaking open to a moment or experience. Maybe you had it in a woodland or prairie, or on the ocean or a river. Perhaps in a desert. It’s a moment of great vulnerability and insight, a moment when your full body and mind transact some emotional understanding and the landscape transcends from simple beauty to deeper faith and belonging — you are the place and the place is you. It is the loudest silence we can ever know. We might have this experience only a few times in our lives, but they are watershed moments. I have yet to have them in a business or apartment landscape, so perfectly sculpted and devoid of wildlife. The experience I’m talking about is connection and compassion on a rare level – a humbling of ourselves we don’t have often enough. Here’s a bit from a piece by Joan Halifax:

“The Benedictine monk Thomas Merton said, ‘The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.’ Merton’s profoundly moral and enactive perspective points to a vision of all of life as interdependent, entangled, and embedded. This vision orients one toward action that is fundamentally unselfish and selfless. This is ‘principled compassion'; compassion with a clear moral foundation based on courage, love, and positive regard for and respect of all beings and things.”

wake us
How do we garden with such compassion? How do advocate for larger landscapes through the lens of such compassion? How do we garden in a world we’ve remade in our own image where we see 50% fewer birds than 40 years? And how can we see ourselves as an equal part of the world without deeper experiences in it – those that go beyond consumption (gardens as beauty, serving humans only) to lives that serve other lives (gardens that support the full life cycle of other species). Bruce Jennings says:

“Ecological solidarity teaches that nature is the place we live within and not simply the surrounding raw material that we use to fulfill our own desires. Solidarity is essential to counter the desire for control…. Solidarity is the counter-sign of power, life’s answering response. Solidarity is the mutuality of concern and care.”

How will you show ethical and ecological solidarity in 2015 for all life? In what ways will your garden manifest that solidarity and defiant compassion? Will you let yourself be open to the full gamut of emotion that caring for this world requires — from grief, loss, sadness, and anger to joy, hope, empowerment, and action? Where will the world of gardening selflessly with native plants take you – and are you willing to have your heart broken so you can fall in love harder with your home ground, no matter where that road may lead?

Downburst

Rain shower over a distant prairie

 

© 2015, Benjamin Vogt. All rights reserved. This article is the property of Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens. We have received many requests to reprint our work. Our policy is that you are free to use a short excerpt which must give proper credit to the author, and must include a link back to the original post on our site. Please use the contact form above if you have any questions.


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