Garden status: high energy overtop a layer of still calm (turn up the volume to hear our excited hummingbird, Axl Rose, and some dark-eyed junko and golden-crowned sparrow chatter.)
For the last three years, I’ve spent an average of two hours a day sitting in my rocking chair on my porch, observing the garden, absorbing nature. It all started because life was drowning me: I was no good to my family, no good to my community, I didn’t even know myself outside of how civilization defined me. I started waking up at 4:00am, so I began getting up and watching the sunrise. The quiet of my porch and the nature that crept in from the periphery were the only things that pulled me out of my own head. They gave me space to breathe and feel something other than the pressure of busyness. They made me realize nothing in nature suffers, or tolerates suffering, like humans do.
Why would that be? How can a small suburban garden have the power to cause such transformation in a human body? This question brought me to the concept of evolutionary intelligence, which is now only used by computer scientists to describe how machine learning intelligently builds on itself, on past programming, to create better artificial intelligence. But we humans - and every plant and animal!- have just such prior, deep programming built into our genetics, echoes of our evolutionary past that stuck because they helped us maintain balance, homeostasis; they helped us survive to reproduce. These traits are built into our species intelligence.
(Squirrel friend before the snow. When I can’t sit in my garden, I sit at my window.)
Civilization broke the human contract with nature long ago, and one of the most exciting things I can think of is rediscovering all the things we’ve forgotten, all the connections that can give our lives meaning again.
💚Liz
