Gardening is the easiest way for people to access the divine through nature, if you have [access to] a yard. So we need to treat our yards as sacred. It's the most easy access to a tangible connection with a higher power. It's right outside your door, right outside your windows. It's literally the habitat that your house sits in. We need to remember this.
Well In A HandBasket is about starting right where you're at to live a healthier, holistic, regenerative life. It's about vitality. It's about endurance. It's about acceptance and abundance. But it's about first and foremost starting with yourself, and remembering we are all part of Mother Nature.
So if you have a yard, the easiest way for you to have an impact on the planet is for you to steward your land, treating it as sacred - meaning not poisoning it; admiring it, spending time with it, honoring it, and giving life to it.
Rather than having a yard with just grass and maybe a little flower bed in front of your window, if that's all you're able to do, what you could do is have native plants instead of ornamental, foreign plants in front of your window. Because if you plant natives, you're going to attract more wildlife: hummingbirds, butterflies, and the pretty birds, and then all of the little caterpillars and insects and stuff that they rely on…
So if you want to attract and replenish the nature that actually lives here, that we've been slowly and abruptly wiping out, that are very important to the entire ecosystem, you have to have the plants that they feed off of and use as housing.
People seem to think that plants are just for our visual enjoyment. They may think a little step further and remember that they provide oxygen to help us breathe. But they actually do way more than that! Their leaves, bark, sap, seeds, and dead branches are vital aspects in the life cycles of the bugs that feed the birds and the other small animals that feed the bigger animals, and we all share these symbiotic relationships.
The native wildlife maintain the pests, meaning the bugs that are bad and the diseases that spread around. The things that most of us don't think about, they help us to mitigate, and yet our initial response to these types of creatures nowadays is poison, which doesn't just harm one thing - ever. The poison is never isolated to one specific target. It can't be. It's poison.
So we need to have reverence for the life that exists around us. The planet is not only for humans, and if it was only humans, we would not survive. Not only because of all the killing we inflict on our own species, but because we would have no resources to survive from! So we need to protect every single piece of the land that we still have left.
Fortunately, there is quite a bit of land remaining in many areas, and we must not take this for granted. A lot of the Earth has been desertified, and there are definitely problems in lots of places, and we've industrialized so much of the planet, and we've extracted so many resources from beautiful, lush places. But there is still a lot of hope, and opportunity for regeneration, left.
When you look at, not from a wildland stance, but from a suburban overview, there's so much potential for rewilding planet Earth. We have this immense vacancy where it's just grass. It's just dead green, basically, that we could turn it into wild, living, energetic, vibrant systems again. It’s almost like a blank canvas!
If we do it properly - if we steward the land that we have, if we're responsible land managers, and we eliminate or minimize the invasive species, and avoid polluting the Earth with toxins - then we will have healthy ecosystems that only benefit everything else. It will ripple out into a positive effect overall for the entire region, or the entire planet, if we are able to make this movement spread across the globe.
I don't know what it's like in other parts of the world. I only know what suburban America is like, because that is where I'm from. That is what I see. That is what I know.
And what I see and know in these places is just empty green. It's green grass, foreign evergreen shrubs, patches of foreign flowers, and that's the majority of it. There's native patches of flowers and trees here and there. There's small pockets of forests (for now) where you're lucky. But what we need is mini forests in most people's yards. And in new developments, we need to leave chunks of established forests instead of taking out the whole thing.
There are so many more options that we could pursue rather than the way that we've been doing things for mass production and profit. And I'm not saying that profit is bad, but we have to be cognizant of the biological costs of these profits.
So I implore every single person who has a yard to plant one thing, or one space, however you want to go about it. But if you're going to plant one thing, to have the best impact, it should be native so it can be beneficial to the land instead of just a statue, meaning it doesn't give life; it just sits there.
We live on this planet. We only have one planet. As of right now, we're not getting off of here anytime soon. (Even if we could, that is no excuse to destroy this place!!!) We only have the resources that are here, which are abundant and there are enough for all of us. We just need to be more efficient in our use of these resources, and we don't need to extract so heavily.
Our culture has become so ingrained in consuming. We feel entitled to the products that we consume without thinking about the materials used to get them to us. People have become so addicted to all of these objects that we've forgotten our connection to the land itself, to Mother Earth. And she is our shared mother. The one thing, if nothing else, that we all have in common is we come from here.
At least I think so. There could be reptilians. There could be aliens. Who knows?
But for the most part, the people that we interact with are human beings who are of Earth matter, and we all need to respect the planet that gives us life, period.
So if you have the privilege of having a piece of this divine planet for yourself, that you live on, that you are “allowed to” touch and to manage, I strongly believe that it is your duty, your obligation to your mother, to our mother, to treat it as sacred and to do no harm to the land. If nothing else, do no harm.
But taking it a step further, it seems obvious to me that in ‘doing no harm,’ we must actively help. Otherwise we’re just perpetuating the harm that is already present!
And in doing so, you will be rewarded. I can promise you that. We absolutely have a reciprocal relationship with nature. There's nothing about taking care of the Earth that isn't beneficial to your soul, to your spirit, to your energy, to your eyes. All of your senses will be enlightened when you actually pay attention to the Earth right in front of you.
When you do something of impact that's beneficial, you will see the life literally unfolding in front of you. It's simply life-giving. It is life itself. It's enamoring. It's mind-blowingly simple and beautiful and incredible.
Even just watching a worm and then thinking about how that worm got here, and wondering what it is doing when I'm not looking at it… There's just so many little things that we overlook and that we pay no mind to.
We need to stop living like that, especially in a world where technology is progressing rapidly.
There's nothing more sacred and more important than having a connection back to your roots, back to nature, back to the Earth, back to life itself. We have to remember that we're alive here.
We're not little pawns on a chessboard. We're not NPCs. If you have breath, you have purpose, and you have the choice to impact positively or not.
So if you're able-bodied, you better be fucking doing something of value for the world, at least for your own home and your own family. And in my opinion, the best way to do that is to start with stewarding your land.
That doesn't mean you have to grow your own food - although you could! It doesn't mean that you have to turn your whole entire yard into a forest or a prairie. But you can always do something.
And then once you start, you can always do more to give back to the planet, to grow your sacred relationship with the Earth. It is precious, precious space.
Most people don't stay on the land that they were raised on their entire life, although there are a few who do, and that's beautiful. But most of us move around or move on, and then we have an opportunity to do our own thing. That should include taking a space, whether it's already lush and beautiful or not, and making it better.
I mean, there's always the adage, you know, make a place better than where you found it. I was taught that as a child, and it just makes sense. You go somewhere and you clean it up and you make it better than how you found it. It doesn't matter what the space is. If you're there, even just for your own benefit, just make it better.
There will always be improvements to make, so you don't need to even try to be perfect! Just putting the intention into helping life, helping the planet, helping the wild creatures and beings, and making more life is the only goal.
The primary element of treating your yard as sacred, and fixing it up, is regenerating it: giving life back to where it once was depleted.
Healing.
Caring.
Loving.
Tending.
Nurturing.
Replenishing.
Nourishing.
Enlivening.
Witnessing…
There's so much about life and the planet to love and be grateful for. And when you treat your own yard as sacred and embrace nature, you can so easily tap into the love and abundance that is all around us.
And it's available to every single one of us, if we just allow it in.