The Garden is my Chorus

June 2026

The air is so thick. It feels like a plant could drink right from it. There’s a bug crawling on my right foot, and the chair I’m sitting in is still damp from hard rain this afternoon. But my foot, and this bug, are glowing, in orange sunlight that feels soft and ancient. Or maybe it’s just the breeze that feels soft and ancient, so quickly and easily adjusting the thermostat of the yard to feel quite comfortable with just a little breath, like someone blowing out the last single birthday candle with enough lightness and reverence to not splatter wax on the cake.

On one side of the house, the neighbor’s toddler is crying. On the other side it’s cackling laughter, and Ronaldo pausing a dominoes game to sing a passionate song in Spanish with a gusto that could surely only be summoned with one hand clasped over his heart.

I saw a hummingbird this morning, darting in and out of the salvia flowers. They are such a vibrant shade of purple to my eyes, I can only imagine what they must look like to insects, butterflies, creatures with more cones. It’s always inspired me to know that we have such limited vision. Keeps our human egos in check.

The longer I sit here, the more I notice. The neon fungus stretching out on the side of the logs like a sci fi skyline. The scent of the chickens, fresh rain, a hint of gasoline, something fruity but subtle. It’s the unapologetic saturation of summer.

The light has already changed, now illuminating the white flowers of the slender mountain mint we just planted yesterday. They are the most unassuming flowers here, and the busiest. What’s a minivan for when you’re not on tour? Definitely it’s for completely filling up with native plants that you’ve dug up from some guy’s backyard (a perfect-lawn-guy… he said these were “too wild”) and then transporting them to their new forever home beside your own vegetable garden. This slender mountain mint attracts the fattest happiest bees I have ever seen. Native pollinators and plants co-evolved. They have a perfectly timed symbiotic relationship. It’s thrilling to witness it! Thanks to Ethan for finding this free offering on Facebook marketplace, and thanks to perfect-lawn-guy for seeing the value in these plants even though he didn’t want them himself.

In the book “Design for the Real World” that was on the nightstand at a house concert in Seattle last year, it said something about how this is “a world of overproduction and undernourishment”. It resonated with me, and I jotted it down. Feels that way, doesn’t it? We’ve made great advances in how we can produce more stuff, faster, more efficiently, cheaper. There’s not a whole lot of headlines about great leaps in how to nourish each other more deeply, sincerely, devotedly. How to nourish a friend who is grieving. Or how to nourish our own spirit when it has become brittle from so much rushing or so much sadness.

All I know is that the more time I spend in my vegetable garden, the more contentment and nourishment I feel in my spirit. It is obvious, direct, reliable — if we're graphing it out like a data scientist. But I’m not going to attempt to quantify this. It’s enough just to qualify it. But I do want to write about it. All those years of touring, the sacrifice I didn’t notice was simply to not experience one day in one place changing into the next day in that same place, and the subtlety and beauty of that. I got to experience staying-in-one-place-ness in a jarring way during the pandemic, but this time it’s by choice. To be here, so that I can notice that last night there were twin cucumbers, and today they will be ever so slightly larger and closer to harvest, and that the tallest flowers will be already standing straighter having gathered themselves from the hard rain. It takes time to gather yourself after a hard rain.

I went to my cousin’s birthday party on Friday night. She sent the invite just a few days before, and to be home and available to go 100%, is/was still a novel thrill. I simply want to be here right now. And that is why I am here at home this June, working in my garden. I’ve been working all kinds of other jobs this spring, too. Catering weddings, working in a warehouse, tending other people’s gardens. Some days I drop so deeply into this new and different present that it’s been hard to wrap my head around the fact that I’m releasing a record next month, and heading back out on the road this fall. But I think this change of pace is good, refreshing, nourishing. Music is nourishing, but I had a strong feeling that, more than anything, I needed a different kind of nourishment this year. In my last online songwriting workshop I hosted, we focused on choruses, and how helpful it is to build in some contrast. Maybe that’s what I’m doing here. The highways are my verses, the garden is my chorus.