The greatest revelations I have made about life have always been in the garden.
Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I used to lust for city life and the concrete jungle. Beyond my science classes, I hardly contemplated the environment. Even when I would visit Arizona growing up, I never quite grasped the landscape as something connected to me, I only wanted to capture it on my phone.
When I lived with my nonna Santa in Arizona, the garden became my sanctuary. While I talk about how that life changed me in so many positive ways, it mostly molded me through difficult experiences.
There is something powerful about contemplating grief and pain in a unique environment. Being amongst plants and rich landscapes constantly provokes me to draw connections from my feelings and experiences to the life around me.
I have never been the kind of person who could listen to advice or information and have it make sense unless I can connect it to a deeper meaning. I recently put my finger on a word that made sense for my thought process– a synthesizer.
I believe that in life there are no endings, but rather infinite new beginnings.
Recently, my fiancé and I had planted some sprouted potatoes and onions in the garden to see what would happen. A simple Google search could have spoiled our experiment, but that would have ruined the joy of what we discovered through patience and curiosity.
After a week or two, deep green shoots started flowing out of the onion we had planted. We then found out that this was actually green onion, and an infinite supply at that. It was pure joy for me to harvest my first batch of green onions. I proudly walked around with the rich aroma of green onions on my hands after cutting them up and putting them in the freezer to use for cooking (don’t worry, I washed my hands).
The same great joy came from the potatoes. Green leaves started bustling through the spots where we planted the sprouted ends. I have not the slightest idea of when to uncover the new potatoes, but I look forward to the serendipity of finding out.
The discoveries have been endless in our small and humble garden. A recent storm knocked over some of our tomato plants that we germinated with seeds we brought from Italy. The broken branches could have been tossed to the side, but I planted them while the stems still breathed life. Now I have more tomato plants than I began with!
Most people see rotten food in their kitchen and they throw it away. For us, we take all of our rotten food and feed it to our compost. I won’t try to explain the exact science, but the different elements like nitrogen and carbon produce an organic, sustainable, and free soil to use. While we usually don’t think about it, our bodies are made up of these same elements.
It’s almost like the Earth is always waiting for us. The flow of life is always ebbing somewhere, somehow, in the most incredible and invisible places we never think about.
Propagation has helped me realize that our lives are abundant with infinite opportunities. When one plant dies, those nutrients go on to nourish something else. We have the ability to take what we have, and multiply it. When circumstances or things feel like they have reached the end, our environment tells us that this is the best condition to grow something new.
I spent so much time putting emphasis on the dollar, how I looked, and other worldly things that could never amount to the beauty that lies beyond what we can see. Propagating a tree or plant requires no money or status, and yet it produces the most rich results.
I thought it was the end when I experienced difficult things, when I lost people and things I loved, when I lost my job, and when I thought I would never find love.
Each ending was like a dead branch of a tree. Each one of those losses had to fall so the tree– so I– could redirect that life into something new, until what once looked like damage became the very condition for fruit.