What would it mean to live as if we belonged to a place? To wake up and greet the day not as something to be conquered, but as an old friend? What if tending a garden wasn’t just about growing food, but about growing connection—between people, between species, between the past and whatever future we haven’t yet burned to the ground?
The way things stand, we live like exiles in our own landscapes. The land is something to be bought, divided, plowed under, paved over. We write laws about it, draw borders across it, strip it bare, poison it, and then wonder why we feel lost. We forget that our hands are supposed to be in the dirt, our ears tuned to the rhythms of the wind, our survival tangled up in roots and rivers and things with wings and claws.
In my work, I do not deal in fantasies of control. I want to teach you to work in the real, the raw, the living. We don’t tame land. We learn from it. We look at a patch of ground and see the ghosts of what used to grow there, the buried seeds waiting for their chance, the slow wisdom of soil rebuilding itself despite everything we’ve done to it.
A garden is not just a plot of land. It’s where past and future collide—where the old ways, the forgotten knowledge, the things that actually worked, fight to take root again. And when we garden like we belong, we stop forcing. We start listening. We work with the land, not against it.
Because the truth is, we’re part of this place whether we act like it or not. Our breath is in the leaves, our bones in the dust. And perhaps the land doesn't need us, but we need it. And if we have any sense left, we’ll remember that before it’s too late.
