Japanese Plums blossoms over my garden gate
Why I garden….
What ever else would I do? In an ever-moving and changing world, I have learned that I can get dizzy with it all, so I hunker down, kneel to the ground, I go towards the ever-moving earth, at her center of gravity, is where I find my own. If I dig my hands in deep, lean into her winds, burst into the wild bloom around me, I too bloom. In the garden I feel like I am growing up right, from the earth towards the sky, like every thing else around me. I wake in the morning eager be outside, to find the subtle or sometimes substantial changes in the green outside my door. All the growth still feels like magic, and I simply get to witness the earth’s sweet surprises everyday, and there is little that moves me more. I don’t really think gardening is a choice for me, but necessary, daily bread, a longing deep in my soul. 
At first it was a way to be outside all day…As a child the garden was home, not a place for work, but where I lived…mud pies and tea parties in the back yard, I could always be found under and huge white blossomed bush that smelled of fresh oranges, I never learned the name or have seen that great wonder of botany since, but it was shelter to years of my becoming, and my dear friend. When I started to wander out of the bounds of our 1/5 acre suburban plot, I ran… into streams and forests into wild rain storms of summer, into jungles and up mountains. It was the untamed world that kissed me with truth that guides me still. As womanhood came upon me, and still is calling me deeper in, I was called down off the mountaintop, lured into grooves and orchards. May be it was pan, but I think now it was more my mother. Guiding me into myself, somehow into a little more tamed, a little more order & production, yet lush, lovely & alive. The valleys, were the water flows and humans huddle, fruit is abundant and the land giving. Into the gardens I have found myself as a woman, one hand marveling at our mothers mysteries, and the other spinning seeds and stems with my own gifts. In a garden I can feel that all I love about the earth resides too inside me, and it is there she whispers her secrets of what we really are capable of as creatresses , as life giving beings, as mysterious plentiful creators. It is the place we were humans, or at least this human belongs, carrying out both the act of creating life and beauty and simply getting out of the miracles way and marveling. That fine thin line between creating and being created, every moment, every day.
Teaching with my beloved corn
Why do I garden, because I love it, because I am called to or simply because I must, but for what ever reason it is simply the one thing in this world that I know for sure I am here to do, and for that I am forever grateful.
