A garden is a dialogue, sometimes a shouting match, sometimes a calm conversation, between the human and the natural worlds. Go deeper, speak what your heart knows and desires, and nature will respond.
What if relationships had weight?

If your friendships, your loves, your connections had weight, thickness, color and textures, what would they look like? Which ones are strong and thick? Which ones are barely threads?

As modern, high-tech citizens of the world, we do an excellent job of manipulating both matter and information, but we have much to learn about the techniques of growing and maintaining relationships. And extending our friendships to the non-human world? The concept is too strange for most of us to take seriously.

But, whoever we are, our ancestors knew better. They talked to trees, offered wine, tobacco or prayers to plants they harvested, and knew that life is more than the chemical reactions of muscles and brain. There was often fear in their conversations, true, and few of us would trade our lives for theirs. But when we recover some of this richness of relationship, we fill the emptiness in our hearts that information and objects cannot.

Growing connections

A friend of mine, a minister in a Christian denomination, was taken on as a student by a Native American medicine man when he was about ten years old. Once, when he was on a vision quest, he knew that he would have a special relationship with the wind. Back down the mountain, he assumed it would just happen some day, no matter what he did. But his teacher said, "No. You need to greet the wind every time you meet it. That is how it will happen."

This is how friendships with the plants, the animals, and the elements grow, the equivalent of sitting down with someone over coffee, talking, sharing stories and ideas, getting to know each other. It takes time, it takes a willingness to listen and to be honest. Without these, is it any surprise that we feel disconnected?

Gardens as concentrations of connections

What does this have to do with gardening? On a miniature scale, we encounter all the problems of working with nature - bugs, disease, early frosts ­ as well as beauty and small miracles of unfolding leaves and petals. What better place to begin an honest, sometimes frustrating, sometimes amazing, dialogue with the world around you?

In any garden, no matter how small, you can look up to the sun, watch the rain dropping onto the palm of your hand, bury a seed or a dead bird, cup a stone in your hand and feel its rough weight or inhale the musty smell of dirt.

And, even in the middle of a city, there is always the wind to greet.