Garden Wanders

In the Pacific NW we are having our fake spring before second winter descends upon us. I’m meeting it with trepidation, resistance, and glee. The other day I was wondering around the gardening and noticing the plants popping up all around. 

I walked by a garden bed I had dug up a few weeks ago, turning the cover crop into the soil, and I noticed, again, that a number of the plants had re-rooted themselves and where stretching up towards the sun tall and sturdy, despite my continual efforts to flip them into the bed- roots up plants down to feed the soil that will feed the plants that I intended to grow.  

And as I kept walking I thought about resilience. And how most plants need 3 things in order to grow and live: sunlight, water, and soil. When we add in minerals we can make their environments more optimal. However if we add minerals and the three basic needs are not met, it is futile. 

In my own garden I pulled away a weed pile choking out a ranunculus plant that surprised me by coming back. Delighted to see it struggling and pale but reaching towards the sun, I began to clear the space around it to offer it more of what it needed- sunlight and some space to breathe, coaxing it towards thriving. 

And I kept thinking about the parallels between plant and human health. Humans also need basic things: enough food, shelter, water without which it would not make much sense to ‘optimize’ anything. In this extreme wellness era, where health is an idea (or many different ideas) defined outside of us with loaded consequences and the responsibility heaped on to the individual, perfectionism makes health a distraction, a morality game, and far from what our body is asking for. Our body is rarely even considered other than an objective problem to be fixed. 

Back in the garden my eyes are drawn to plants popping up everywhere, before any compost or mineral additives have been added into the soil. Life just living when it has it’s basic needs met. No need for equations, specifics, protocols, management. Just life doing its thing. 

My approach to gardening since my recovery from orthorexia has been much messier. I turn my attention towards it but not my suffocating grasp. My attention to the garden is soft and curious, not rigid and insisting. I offer to the garden and it offers back, and I don’t stress about the details and specifics. We grow together and teach each other things. I have used the map that I cultivated with my own body in my recovery. No longer a project to manage and a thing to be far away from at all costs, I inhabit my body and I allow the garden and myself to inhabit each other. We co-create, which involves attunement and response. My body and my garden get to ask for what they need, and respond with what is working and what isn’t. In this way, the health of each is participatory and agency aligned. 

In my orthorexia, I was sure that everything I was doing was “good”. That was reinforced all around me. But yesterday in the garden I realized that where I was now felt much more alive, grounded, whole, and well- despite the fact that my recovery took me away from many health behaviors that my stressed, dissociated mind was gripping tightly to.

I encourage my clients to get curious about what health means to them. When I ask at first, they say things that are very near to what we are told (sold) health should be: more vegetables, more exercise, weight loss; typically a long list of to do’s and demands in an already busy life. With some prompting and some curiosity we typically uncover a shame narrative that is wrapped up in all of this, and with some light and care on that narrative we can move into some space that offers something more real and unique to the individual. And that typically offers a roadmap towards changes that allow for more Aliveness rather than more management, more to do’s, more stress. It’s a softening. A reckoning. A re-working and a re-aligning. But ultimately, a Liberation.