A week or so ago, I found myself gripped by a different kind of anxiety. It was a combination of urgency, a sense of time passing too quickly; along with a growing sense of powerlessness and a lack of control. The result was fear, where the narratives felt like tea leaves telling me the future; the kind of fear that Nietzsche was referring to when you stare too long into the abyss. It wasn’t a crisis of meaning or purpose. Quite the contrary. It was the realization that circumstances were dictating too much of my life and that meaning and purpose were being neglected.
I made space to sit with what I was feeling; to apply what my dear friends and mentors, Shakti and Alan, call “looking and listening”. Journaling remains my preferred method for getting everything out and sorted. I turned off my problem-solver brain and sat on the patio of our temporary home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, filling the pages with feelings, narratives, and observations. As I absorbed the lush and organic beauty of the backyard, a message appeared and settled on my heart:
“Water the garden.”
I first thought it was a circumstantial thing; my mind taking the pages of journal entries and then applying the surroundings to give me a neat little metaphor so I could get on with my day.
But it wasn’t that. Spiritual messages have a gravitas that the mind can not produce. Further, I hadn’t thought about gardens in a very long time.
In the era and area I grew up in, having a garden was rarely a hobby. It was part of the family food supply. Growing up in Baker City, Oregon in the 1970s and 80s, my mom, my grandmother, and my aunt all had gardens. Almost everything you could find in the produce section at the grocery store, you could find in their gardens. There are many fond memories there, but the last garden I had was in 1992. Not exactly a top-of-mind thing.
The metaphor of a garden is also common in religion.
There is a famous old Christian hymn called “In the Garden”.
Sufi poet, Hafiz, has a beautiful poem called “The Garden”.
In the Hindu tradition of Bhatki poetry, there are many poems related to gardens, including a series of poems by Mirabai.
In Buddhism the mind is often referred to as a garden that needs cultivation.
Beautiful, right? But for me, the garden metaphor comes with a lot cynicism and skepticism.
The fact that it is such a common metaphor in Christianity is the reason it felt so strange to get this message. After years in a fundy church, I intentionally avoided using their metaphors, but especially ones related to gardens. It not only represented a narrow and oppressive doctrine, it was also spiritually lazy and a form of stating the obvious.
Nevertheless, I accepted the message and went about getting curious about it.
What is a garden, in this case and at this time?
I arrived at this definition:
A garden is any joint venture between Spirit (choose your own term here) and humans.
Or to put it another way, it is this equation:
Divine force + human effort = growth .
By that definition, these are gardens:
A conscious partnership:
A conscious partnership is a joint venture between Spirit and two conscious people, often representing the union of divine feminine and divine masculine. A conscious partnership does not grow on its own. It does not tend to itself on its own. Without watering it just becomes a high-functioning friendship. Especially related to intimacy. I don’t necessarily mean sex. I mean prioritizing sacred time and protecting sacred space. Which in turn, prevents sex from becoming obligatory or rote. This is the garden that also grows trust, autonomy, and gratitude.Purpose:
Your purpose is a partnership between Spirit and your specific set of talents, gifts, and skills. It is the thing you are here to do that only you can do. Late-stage capitalism, and the dominant political, religious, and academic institutions want you to operate like a machine. A machine fulfills its purpose by doing its job, which is to sustain the system. And if you don’t water your purpose, it will just become a job. Or worse, a memory of what you really wanted your life to be about.Creativity:
In the chakra framework, this is the second chakra, the sacral. It is where things that didn’t exist before are conceived, grown, and released in the world. It is the home of imagination, play, wonder, noticing. The same systems I mentioned prior see creativity as either a kind of skill or a pastime; something you do last, not first. None of that is true. Creativity is the practice of the one thing that most have in common with God (again, insert your own term here): to create. When creativity is not watered, life becomes art never made or made but never experienced by others.Justice:
Justice is where Spirit joins with your moral clarity to be in service to others. It is loving your neighbor. It is the community garden, literally and figuratively. This garden grows empathy, compassion, equanimity. When neglected, we stop producing those fruits and begin to produce the thing that most sustains extractive or oppressive systems: apathy. Each one of the gardens requires its own kind of courage, but this garden requires the courage of standing up for others, refusing to be silent, being willing to put your life on the line.
“Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life someone else will.”
- Greg McKeown
Ok, then what is “watering”?
The opposite of watering is whining, complaining, blaming.
Imagine a real garden that a couple owns. One of them begins to complain to the other that the flowers are wilting, the soil is dry, things have stopped growing. Even if it is true that one of them is neglecting the garden, complaining does not water the garden.
In any of the gardens above, there is no delegating responsibility. No one is coming to do it for you. There is no divine miracle that violates the science of growth.
Watering, then, is leadership.
Watering is actively prioritizing and applying the resources that a garden most needs: time, energy, attention, devotion.
It is not just making sure the watering is done. That is certainly better than neglect, but it is not a task. It is what Steven Covey meant by putting first things first.
For me, the first first thing is how I prioritize what I give my attention to.
It is paying attention to details. Not all of them all of the time. Just noticing something beautiful, unique, artful and giving it a few moments. In that sense, noticing is watering.
Consciousness is good and necessary, but it doesn’t water the garden. All it does is make you aware that there is a garden.
Getting shit done is a good feeling, but it doesn’t water the garden.
Entertainment and other kinds of distractions are fun, but they don’t water the garden.
Like other applications of leadership, it is not about intention. It is about action and results.
“Life is long enough … if it were all well invested.” - Seneca
I absolutely believe that a well-lived life is made up of joy, abundance, and adventure. But this will not come from just having a strategy, a plan, or money. Nor will it come from how “spiritual” you are, how often you meditate or pray. If any of those were true, there would be a lot more truly happy people in the world.
When we lead the watering, the forces we don’t dictate move in our favor. Or more specifically, move in favor of the various gardens we are responsible for growing. This means that joy, abundance, and adventure are the fruits of well-tended gardens, the profit of the joint venture with Spirit.
As I pondered the simplicity and enormity of this lesson, I recalled a toast I made with Virginia on a date night last month:
May we be as skilled at creating abundance as we are at handling a crisis.
At the time, I thought that it was just a damn good toast. I realize now it was the precursor to receive the message about watering the garden.
I have come to learn that regardless of its source or intensity, all anxiety contains within it the gift of action. In this case, acknowledging the anxiety and examining it revealed the very things I need to take action on. Realizing that watering the garden is leadership also gave me something to do and something to be responsible for that I had some control over; which then greatly reduced the sense that life was happening to me and also alleviated the fears of lost time and lost opportunities.
I am going to stop there. I need to figure out what to do with all of this zucchini. (If you know, you know 🙂 )
Love this article, love what it means, love that you turn complaining, resignation and dooming into stewardship and action. That’s what a good gardener does 🥰
That was some good zucchini trip. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and thoughts. Felt really conected with it and, as always, found myself ways to apply them to some experience currently happening in my life.