Lesson 1 - You Have To Try

Lesson 1 - You Have To Try

I am a part time gardener. Gardening is a hobby and a passion that I had merely been adjacent to my entire life. My mother would plant impatiens while my father trimmed the hedges. My sisters and I would ignore them as we ran through the sprinkler. I never had the opportunity to dive into it myself; I lived in student apartment housing and on the 3rd floor of buildings, never with the agency or capacity to get my hands dirty. It wasn’t until I was 28 that I was in a circumstance where I had a place to live that was suited to the craft.

It was February of 2020 and I had just moved from a dinky Chinatown apartment into a house with a backyard. That backyard was fenced in, and mostly covered in stone. There was one raised bed on the south side, which meant it was closer to the sun. That was a good thing, I was pretty sure. The front yard was also mostly stone, with small sections of soil ready for planting.

When choosing to move into the place with my roomate, it was winter and I had vague notions of conceptualizing a garden. Working the earth is in my blood, and I had grand but abstract plans for flowers, fruit trees, and vegetables. Tremendous possibility, but not the priority of a recently single bachelor.

Well, apparently someone ate a bat and we were all confined to the little boxes you see on Google maps or House Sigma for a long while. So in the summer of 2020 I spent a lot of time in that backyard. Creating a garden, playing, learning, and experimenting. I spent time there smoking, drinking, listening to music, seeing friends at a social distance, and trying to make the most of a bad situation. Most importantly, I learned a ton of lessons through interacting with plants, nature, and life via gardening.

It inspired me. I was inspired to connect more deeply with my forefathers. I was inspired to pick up the craft that I describe as the most human vocation. I was inspired to share stories, write poetry, learn about the world and nurture my environment.

The more I gave the more I got. The more I dug the more I discovered. I began to consider strategies, tactics, and methods. Through this journey, I started to notice some fundamental truths about myself, about other people and about the world. These truths are mostly simple in essence. They are ancient philosophies so automatic that I understood them implicitly as if one large revelation had washed across me. Not a bad outcome from spending $25 on ten bags of dirt, $40 on seedlings and pilfering an old shovel from my mom’s shed.

Perhaps most importantly, I established a strong connection to the three men most responsible for my existence. My father, Ken. His father - my grandfather, Paul, and my maternal grandfather, Sebastiao. My father was a part time gardener, responsible for mowing the lawn, irrigation, and keeping my mother happy. My grandfather Paul was an avid flower gardener, famous in his neighbourhood for his 7 foot tall delphiniums. My grandfather Sebastiao is famous to me for the 2 acres in his backyard known in his native Portugal as a “Quintal”. At the age of 90 he still operates a tiny farm that once had been a lush forest of summer vegetables to a 10 year old me.

The dormant gardener in me was waiting to be awakened. I had not spent time in my life nurturing much of anything. I had had a vague interest in plants, it would be good to save money on herbs and flowers, and they looked nice... but my path in life had never drawn me in.

Until:

On a warm Toronto May morning, the kind that feels full of potential, the sort that in context is exactly what you’ve been yearning for. It was rainy. Rainy and grey, perhaps 12 or 15 degrees. It was the sort of spring day that after months of dark, cold, parka and peacoat filled excursions - you couldn’t be happier to get outside in. If it were the middle of July, you would say it was miserable. But on that grey May morning, it was so perfect it felt like a religious experience.

That raised bed in the backyard was overgrown. It was raised about two and a half feet off the ground, and it was fallow. It had been neglected for years. The previous tenants had not been interested in caring for that area at all. The space in question, as it turns out, was full shade. It was on the south side of the backyard, (alas not south facing), and fenced in. It was about 2 feet deep and 10 feet wide. There were leaves and dead vines everywhere. Having only that abstract notion of what I wanted to do with the space (potatoes probably…maybe) - I decided that I needed to clear it out. Take the chaos of the space and convert it into order.

So I grabbed the only shovel I had - a decades-old edger I had “borrowed” from my mother’s old shed and began trying to loosen and turn the soil over so that I could clean up the space and plant something new.

I got to work. I used the limited tools I had to try and clear the area. I dug and I began to notice patterns in the space. While there were tonnes of half rotted leaves and detritus that needed cleaning, there was also an enormous maple tree to the south. That maple was entirely in the neighbours yard and it had been raining down leaves and seeds for a decade. After clearing the debris, I started to get after the actual soil. I determined very quickly that the lion's share of the plot was completely rootbound. It was packed full of invading root extensions from that beautiful maple. This was a great tree 80 years old at least, with an impressive canopy and wide shady reach.

Knowing what I know about trees today, my next action was harmful. You see, the root network of a tree like that is massive and delicate. It should not be disturbed so nonchalantly. We ought to honour and respect these organisms. Disturbing their resource gathering network can kill the organism. Nevertheless, I naively went to war. First loosening the soil, then discovering that tightly packed network of roots, thinking that if these remained, I’d never be able to grow anything at all. And so, I hacked and I whacked. I sweat, and I toiled in the garden for the first time of my life. I dug.

I was sweating and my muscles were aching, the constant pushing and pulling and swinging this long piece of wood with a metal blade on it was blistering my hands. Yet, I was unaware of all that sensation. For I was in a trance as the warm mist descended around me for hours of repetition. Later that day, I was so inspired that I wrote a poem that I called a meditation.

Meditation from my garden:

I dig and till, the cramped earth calling me. Serene, the light warm rain from above is like a blanket embracing me. Jet black soil slips underneath my fingernails, its scent blooming up through my nose. A little patch of dirt, nourishing my soul.

Relaxed. Calm. Focused.

A robin floats down to try and take advantage of my labour. I’m so affixed to my task that I barely notice him.

He softly navigates close, our attention drawn quietly to each other. Big brown eyes staring. We share a long moment before he flies off. I imagine he is searching for sustenance. Bounty for his young family.

Visions of my father; Connection. Home.

There is something about being wrist deep in dirt. Something primal. Something that connects you to generations past and to come. It connects you to humanity. To your humanity and the humanity of others. These connections had been around me my entire life, and I had never reached out to experience them. It was only through a conscious decision to do “something” that tore down the invisible barrier I had been bumping up against.

And so I finished digging and I learned my first lesson from gardening: you need to try. Forward momentum is invaluable. We cannot excuse ourselves and cite paralysis or lack of experience. We must take our first step, take a shovel to the ground, and suddenly: an entire world might open up for us. We will at once be exposed to a lattice of possibilities and opportunities that were impossible to conceptualized otherwise.

When we try, there is an implicit self admission that we are open to change and growth. That we are ready for something new. That we are ready to give, and subsequently get in return.

There are moments in life when we are prepared to try. Moments we have planned and had the foresight and time to chart a direction and orient ourselves towards an intentional heading. These are powerful moments, but the preparation is not the key, the key is the exercise of doing. The exercise of spending our energy even though we are not certain of the outcome is itself the valuable act. It is an act that frequently pays dividends. When we try, we activate. We begin to turn possibilities and opportunities into material experiences, successes, failures, and teachable moments. We find passion, and artistic spirit, and meaning. We move towards flourishing.

Motion is favourable to stasis because entropy exists. The world is fluid and our context and dynamic are ever changing. To resist change is a losing proposition.Therefore we must accept change as an inevitability.

Once we accept that change is inevitable, we can begin to take actions that positively direct the course of that change.

While planning is admirable, it is also daunting. Answers are almost never clear, and anticipating a long term sequence is a futile exercise for most people. The options are too great, the permutations and pathways too abstract to thoroughly explore. But when we choose to try, when we realize that we must try, we regain control. We move from passive to active, and we take an enormous step towards unlocking our potential.

For me that moment in the garden was the first domino in a long sequence. It unlocked a new universe. It afforded me a lifelong passion, an opportunity to learn about myself, a vessel for tranquillity and an avenue to pursue meaning and connection. It was only possible because I made the effort. I tried.

It is scary to forge ahead. Something as simple as starting a new hobby, or going to an event, or pursuing a project or passion. There is potentially a mountain of learning. There are skills required, and opportunities for things to go wrong. A better way to think about it then, is to consider those pursuits as a long sequence of digestible bites. You don’t have to approach the whole, you can kick off a journey with one step. One single action, and you are further ahead than you ever had been before. Tricking yourself into devouring the beast with a thousand cuts. That first simple action is to try. In my case, it was as simple as picking up an old shovel, stepping outside on a rainy spring morning, and starting to dig.