Hello!

I am new at this, so bear with me as I tunnel through this odd wilderness….

I begin at the end, like so many stories:

I find myself on a mountain peak, cold and impersonal, jutting in stark relief high above the sun-dappled valley below. Before me stretches the patchwork and tangle of my life, as it fades into the murky beginnings of me.  Beneath me lies the cool sweet earth of my grave. 

It is the richest moment of my life, the moment that yields the broadest view of the entirety of my journey, a moment that weaves together the deep textures and smoky hues of early morning magic and the excitement of the child, ever curious and brave, ever seeking the mystery just around that next bend…

This too-distant mirage gradually blends into the brambles and uncharted seasons where my life ran wild, a minefield of painful ricochets and gross misunderstandings. The terrain then rises slowly, gently into softly quilted foothills of intricate symmetry, reflecting the more patient ministration of a seasoned heart and hand, a more willing soul. 

This is my life, the wonder and the terror, the harsh and the tenderly contoured, the swamps of fear, peaks of triumph, the barren deserts of long-denied need, the oceans of tears, the tangled connections, some enduring, some aborted and buried deep…. all stitched together by this golden thread, which even now lies across my palm…

What do I want to see from here? So much I can't change, can't control, can't undo…  What is to be gained, gazing across this land, when the world tumbles unpredictably and people are drowning in sorrow and despair? Why do some people prosper and others fail to thrive?

What is the magical thread that will secure our understanding of who we are, and what we are doing here, and how to share this precious island-jewel that nests us in the cup of its being as it is nested in a cup of infinite blackness? Where truth is couched in paradox and revealed only in reflection?

So it came to me one day, as I was considering this question, that what I want to see from the cold, clear eyrie of my grave is the beginning of our journey, yours and mine, back to the garden planet we unwittingly abandoned so long ago. In some dim recess of time, Mind became enamored with its own reflection, and misreading it's conceptual products as intelligence, became thirsty for objective proof of its dominion over Nature and all the creatures who appeared less intellectually endowed than itself (including women: how convenient!). 

Mind, in its endless productions, erected institutions in its own image, quickly redefining the material world by grace of its own superior distinctions. And so, assiduously mistaking the map for the territory, its reign of error began…

My dream is to create another garden planet, where small patches of the wild order that is true harmony begin to challenge the metastizing tumor of the now ubiquitous dominion of a pathology I have named Pornographic Mind.

The term Pornographic Mind denotes the dark mind that in its terror and delusion conceives of others, of Life and Nature and all that is manifest as mere means to gratify its endless, insatiable urges; a mind rooted in darkness, disgorging from its bowels a filthy river of profanity and ignorance that sours and bitters our hearts and fouls our beautiful world. 

It is a mind that reviles the unruly perfection of nature and the infinite ocean of the wild-within, replacing it with long, straight lines, concrete and asphalt,  belching piles of steel and deep, deep scars where we have raped the earth for its “material assets.”

It is a mind that will blow the top off a mountain to hold water, that will needle the landscape with latticed spires of bolts and trusses, that will replace cliffs and canyons with cascading condos, destroy the curiosity of a child in the bowels of a sytem called education, create institutions of health and welfare that support sickness and death.

It is a mind that devalues matters of heart in favor of appearances, and creates a world where kindness is weakness and people are objects and bombs are dropped on babies to secure a peace that is really just another link in this endless, endless, endless chain of violence…..

And foments a culture where our sexuality, a most sacred, vulnerable and ferocious power springing from our deepest well, this pure and sparkling fountain of love and light, of wild abandon and communion, is routinely negated and transformed by Pornographic Mind into meaningless orgasm and the sensory illusion of dominance.

In this transformation, its final savagry becomes its crowning glory, revealed upon inspection to be a mere symbol of its need to divide and conquer, to cleave us from ourselves in order to satisfy its unquenchable and unconscionable lust for dominion. 

It is in this cleavage, this rending of our selves from our most sacred center that we find the breeding-ground of a tragic, fractured mind lost forever in darkness and delusion….

So, in short or long, this becomes my mission: in the time alotted me I will put my energies into the creation of a garden planet, a place where we can all express our unique proclivities and create a rampant carpet of grace and courage, freedom and balance, compassion and respect; a garden both symmetrical and wild, unplanned and unforeseen, but perfect nonetheless in its own internal truth and eternal becoming. 

The Garden Planet Project is currently a mission of one, but all are welcome and all are essential to this cause.  I abandon myself to this dream completely, even though you may scoff.  There is room for dreamers on a garden planet. There is room for anyone who contributes to realization of the Ideal. This desire is common to all human cultures, and appears to be embedded deep within our wild natures….

Like otters in the universe, we deserve to love, to grow and to learn and laugh in freedom, fearless and playful, connected, fierce when provoked, murder an alien concept.  A garden planet is a place where this possiblity becomes reality. It is not necessary to destroy what already is: it is cultivated on its own land and grows at the pace of its own design. It is a becoming, an emerging patchwork of small gardens, yours different than mine, each like no other, equally precious and irreplaceable and necessary to the whole… Each a spire of light piercing the sky from a wildnerness that is even now a pincushion of dark obelisks emanating from earth to sky…

We travel now, back to the land of my youth. Then, I was not a great gardener. I had no hedgerow, no nice picket fence to define my small patch. I routinely tresspassed into your garden, and was shocked when you turned me away. So I became watchful as I nursed my wounds.  I spent a lot of time comparing my garden with yours, judging yours superior or inferior to mine, striving to emulate what I saw as successful in a bid for your approval.  Lacking confidence, I allowed others to enter my garden at will, poop on my meandering paths and tell me where to plant my petunias.

Consumed with my own powerlessness, I cursed the unruly patch that was my home, and did not amend the soil or plant seeds with compassion, prune with a steady hand or acknowledge the need to weed. I was a lazy gardener. Instead, as youth are wont to do, I invited others to tend my garden for me so that I could bask in the reflection of what appeared to me as love.  I would cut off my own arms and legs to squeeze into the too-often too-small patch allotted, and was left bleeding and empty with no space to run, no space to breathe, no place to hide...

With patience, diligence, acceptance and compassion, I have learned to tend my own garden, to order it according to the whispers deep within my own knowing, and to usher firmly to the gate those who run roughshod over my dream.  Not with impatience or judgment, but speaking my truth gently and with great persistence, in full knowing that they do not need to be shown the way, that they must, like myself, learn to tend their own gardens before they will not be destructive to mine....

Now I can see that what I have done, many others have done before me, and that we are all capable of doing the same.  As we learn, our gardens will intersect, and the kingdom will unfold, bit by precious bit, as we engage in the tasks of nurturing that which we want to grow, and laying that which we find harmful to growth gently, ever so gently, upon the steaming, well tended compost-pile way over there in the corner...

After all, on a Garden Planet, nothing is wasted.....

This is the rough draft, the seed catalogue lays open on my lap to page 3, and spring is yet slumbering beneath frozen soil, beneath the bitter winds of war and famine and the storms of clawing need.  It is time to dream, time to speak the hard truths as loudly as we can, with persistance and humor, with willingness and grace.  And you will see: one small, lovely patch at a time, we will create the world that will sustain us, body and soul, mind and spirit, whole, healthy and free.

Yes, we will!