i am a garden to love and nourish
All the love and nurturance of our thousands of gardens, dwindled and shriveled in an instance, while my heart followed lead
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I saw that sentence typed in the dull tinted font written on the bottom of my friend’s chocolate bar, sitting unopened at the studio table where I am currently writing while visiting them in Durango, Colorado. I stare at it over and over. All the other works in progress and books are tucked to the side in the space, opening a channel to fit my computer into a bare spot. I am a garden to love and nourish. Gardens are for loving and nourishing. If they are not loved and nourished, they die. The garden of love is one to nourish.
Like a garden, love is tending, mending, nourishment, encouragement, awe, perseverance, persistence, flexibility yet boundaried, full-bodied and fierce, soft and consistent. Effortless. A pull and a draw to give, to nurture that which is planted, is begun, is envisioned.
A bond is formed between tender and tended, and in that collaboration, a unique garden full of new life grows, where what exists is only there because it is created between the tender and tended together, and cannot exist alone. Tending over time makes this unique life strong, complex, weathering many seasons, lulls and windstorms. The selves who make the garden together become changed by what they create together.
What happens when we stop tending the garden, or the beloved who is the garden? Or, one tends another while the other, soaking in the tending without reciprocity —without giving any fruits or flowers eventually, the tender always hoping even for even one ripe fruit to enjoy of their beloved. The fruit withers, the vines die, and the garden falls flat. The fruit may disperse seed in its lack of offering, where some of the seeds may be viable, others not. In the death of the garden, some seeds carry on the beauty and vibrance and something will continue on somehow.
I sat all day on my friends’ back porch, crying, and staring at the San Juans in the distance, some with snow on the peaks. These are mountains we walked across together, fiercely brave, amongst wildflowers and fists while the pandemic haunted the world around us. I sit clear on a mesa in the Piñon Juniper forest, where lush grasses, Paintbrush and Penstemons still bloom into late June. I didn’t move myself from that porch all day, I had a ritualistic plan to hit La Plata Canyon to go to a favorite campsite to do some painting in a handmade book with handmade paper I made, and play some music on my friend’s derelict guitar, do some praying, and I decided I didn’t think I could handle going today.