Thinking out loud this week...

Mutual Flourishing; hard questions; Hard work, ritual and responsibility; gardening as a moral act; If you are down on your knees, you might as well scrub the floor – or plant corn, or beans, or carrots. These are the phrases that are jumping out at me from this conversation. They are making me THINK-and think differently!

AND, that is exactly the kind of thinking, considering, envisioning, and manifesting the Cultivating Place Symposium is intended for.

Are you in?

Registration is now open to the public for the Inaugural Power of Gardeners Symposium – this year focused on cultivating place in South Bend, Indiana!

Coming together is how we grow, and it is how we grow better together.

Head over to this link for more details on speakers and field trips, receptions, and time in community!

There are two additional phrases that Erika and Renee share in our conversation and which are really sticking with me: the first is the one about how so “much of work is an act of translation” – our gardens are very much acts of translation: of our histories, our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our preferences.

The second comes later and is about the incarcerated residents coming away from work and classes in the gardened spaces with a renewed and remembered “sense of being”.

Did you notice that?

Erika did not say a sense of well-being, but a sense of being.

Every act of gardening is opportunity to remember we are alive, on this planet, and one of many lives here.

Every act of gardening grants us access to a grounded sense of being.

May it be so for every one of us, may we help it to be so for many many more. Keep gardening Gardeners.