The Garden Space

what is inside me? how does one plant love?

the Garden Space: an introduction

I conceive of my inside self as a garden.

The summer I turned fourteen, I found self-exploration waiting for me in a red and white speckled notebook. I was visiting with my father at the time, busy watching the last morsels of childhood elongating and ripening into something deeper and sweeter. More graceful. It was a quirky, sitcom-esque environment. One of the neighbors left their Christmas lights up all year round and lit them every single night. There was a cooky old white man as the next door neighbor who wandered in, ate anything sweet, and spoke with us about whatever moment in time his dementia settled him in. Foxes raised their young in the abandoned shed across the school— you could always see the babies playing with each other at sunset. I cannot express how deeply I was in that space. I was in community with that space. That house was built of brick, meant to last whole and warm through decades, complete with a dumbwaiter and a grandfather clock and backyard facing what was, essentially, a mild Colorado wood. We all moved slowly, unencumbered; daylight stretched until 10pm and so did I.

Every day, one of my chores was to water the foliage in the backyard. I was not a stranger to dirt. I grew up gardening with my grandmother, who grew up gardening with hers. Soil in my hands has always felt like a grand return to self. I spent a lot of time toting a watering can that summer and it changed me actively. The way me and these plants would just sit there and look at each other. I got to know them well. This was the first time I discovered my garden space, journaling with them in the backyard.

I reached inside myself some summertime afternoon to keep my own self company and pulled out bright green raspberry leaves from my chest cavity. And who was surprised? The wild overgrowth we had in the backyard was friendly and audacious. They grew just like me, the way they hung to themselves until the good, thick ongoings of July; bright and bursting. At (almost) fourteen, I thought fruit plants were so silly. The flowers hid all that time under big leaves but couldn’t resist growing so good and so soft bodied and ripe and so heavy they would bend the whole plant and give themselves away. Raspberry juice tasted just like me. It was the first time I had ever experienced watching myself bloom in real time.

I went inside myself and felt found among the greenery— the first touch of my own earth. They hummed a hello back to me under my bare toes. I had a garden space inside my chest. How wonderful. “This makes sense,” I thought. “The earth is everywhere.”

What I did not account for was the rest of me. I get stuck in my hubris; I think I know myself. I thought the process of exploration meant understanding and indexing my mental real estate— thought it possible to know myself better than anyone else did. The reality of my own self-discovery is that it is impossible to know myself in my entirety. Here is, in no particular order, things I have learned about the components of my own garden.

There are many things I grow on my own inside my own self, happily within my control. Cultivation in the regular way we think of gardens: a teeny little plot of tilled soil, ready to receive whatever we envision. I grow whatever I please. I feel like this is easy to imagine: little nursery plants called patience, discipline, cultivated in rich and slow-acting soil.

There are the plants that don’t come from me— maybe they were gifted by other people, other foliage, other times. Things of beauty were growing here long before I saw them; it speaks to my internal self being above and beyond me, able to store and nurture love upon my behalf. I’ve reflected on how my Aunt Nadaline left me a Wisteria sapling, way before I ever knew to reach inside myself. Many people, especially people older than me, planted seeds of their love in my Garden Space, for safe keeping. When I was fourteen and journaling, I imagined I would find those seeds again one day and be grateful. Later on, I was twenty, better equipped for adult feelings and full of gumption, so busy looking around for those all those little seeds from my loved ones that I struggled to realize where all those beautiful growing things came from. Gifts from folks who knew their lovings would be sweeter fruit later. The Garden Space teaches me I am not alone in my multitudes.

I am allowed to engage with such involuntarily elements and grow them as much I can, or as much as I want to, or as much as I don’t want to— but earth is the earth. The nature of earth is cooperative, not indebted or controlled. What is in me is also me, and the expanse of myself has opinions about what they would like to steward. Some things will grow that I would consider weeds, and they will grow anyhow. Some things will not grow no matter how many gentle loving prayers I soak it with. I do, in part, have to contend with what I am given, regardless of whether it is convenient for me and my to-do lists. I was already this person before I learned to pay attention to myself.

There are many things that are not my garden but are here in full effect nonetheless.

I spoke a little bit on TikTok about an element I am not able to control, which are romantic feelings. In fact, all emotions in my garden space are involuntary. They can push through the crust of me like tulips. They can move through me as the wind does and rustle my leaves. Emotions are exclusively meant to be felt. I am not tasked to control, coerce, or capture the wind; I am tasked with growing to withstand it. Feelings are also not to be forced, only asked— in the same way I cannot force hummingbirds to appear to delight me, but I can place birdbaths and nectar out to ask them to come around more. The garden space teaches me about reciprocity with a space and patience with a space and the goodness of the two in tandem. I am in community with myself.

There is, finally, the unknown. The more I see about my internal self, the more I see. I did not understand at first the big valley I was in, like a crater from the foot of some great creature. It took years of exploration to realize how vast I am. Even still, I hear water running somewhere near me now and cannot place it. I only realized there were mountains to the north and west of my little garden in my later adolescence; I am only now beginning to climb these summits. The more I see, the more I see. I don’t think I will ever see everything.

What I will do is sit and stay in the shade of trees other people planted in my garden for me, years ago when I was too young to see the saplings as anything but a loose and uncertain responsibility. I read under these branches now. Now, I spend time growing trees to shade the people I will come to keep and collect. And I settle into myself. The sun sets and red raspberry juice dribbles down my chin. 

I am in the spring of my life.