Connecting with the Circuitry of the Garden

...using your built-in modem...

Have you ever had a thought or remembered something and then walked away from the place where you had that thought, only to forget it, then walked back to the place where you first had that thought, and remembered it again? What’s going on with that? Something similar sometimes happens with dreams: we awaken from a dream in the middle of the night, shuffle into the bathroom maybe, come back to bed, lie down and sometimes pick up again right where we left off.

There are no doubt many explanations for this kind of thing. The waking recall of a waking thought might be said to result from similar sensory inputs creating an associative response, and no doubt sometimes this is a factor. Maybe I was standing at the stove, walk to the pantry, “Oh, what was I looking for?” Then back to the stove: “Of course! A can of coconut milk!”

And sure, in a way it’s just common sense that as I return to a place, I return to a thought. But I also notice that any facile, simplified explanations for place-based thoughts, inspirations, or recollections tend to skate over the relevant details. In the case of an ingredient needed at the stove, it makes sense that the process of making the dish will drive the association. “Oh right, a can of coconut milk!” Because that’s what the process calls for. That’s what’s needed next.

But hidden in that commonsense explanation is something truly remarkable to consider: We’re always in process. We’re always cooking up something. We’re always moving from one thought to the next, one place to the next. And I invite you to consider that our experience is driven by a kind of environmental alchemy, a powerful amalgamation where inner and outer worlds are in communication on more levels than is commonly imagined. We bring our thoughts to places and sometimes places bring our thoughts back to us.

For example, when I was living in Royal Oak and teaching in Dearborn, a commute of about a half hour if the traffic was good, I used to rely — RELY — on the intersection of Southfield Road and I-696 for the inspirations that would turn into that day’s lesson plans. Seldom did I know precisely what was I was going to do before then. Yes, sometimes projects the students in my classrooms were working on had next logical steps, like getting the can of coconut milk from the pantry at a certain point in making a soup, but in this case, the roads were my pantry, and the ideas just came. I mused that my “Lesson Plan Book” — and yes I did have one — was more a record book than a plan book. I filled it out largely after the fact. I did that for years. Apparently with good results overall.  I mean, I was invited to share what I was doing at building, district, intermediate school district, and even one national conference meeting.

But, am I making too big a deal out of the role of physical location in this story? I mean after all, one year I walked to work along Michigan Avenue, a completely different stretch of road, and with similar results. But to me it seems analogous to bringing my laptop to a hotel room instead of my home office: I was just uploading and downloading from a different location. So is it really that surprising? Doesn’t it make sense that one could set up a connection with similar sources of inspiration from different locations on the planet? Yet, that doesn’t mean that the trees and storefronts I passed were any less involved in the associational nexus and interchange I was building with my environment, connecting events going on “inside” me with things “outside” myself. Sometimes I return to bed and slip back into a dream. I can also return to a stretch of Michigan Avenue and…well, it’s pretty much the same thing.

You may want to keep the internet analogy in mind. It’s important to what comes next because, as with a device on the internet, a person in an environment or physical location is involved in ongoing two-way communications with that place. And I have reason to believe that communication is much more comprehensive in scope than the rudimentary record-keeping of keystrokes, emails, posts, searches, uploads and downloads and associated metadata on the electronic web.

At all times and many, many ways, we’re generating and responding to signals. Profoundly multileveled, multidimensional signals. And the world is listening.

One dramatic example of this — call it a piece of “evidence” if that helps — came from an experience I had in our backyard garden a couple years ago. It was late spring, and I was moving shredded, semi-composted leaves in a wheelbarrow from a pile I had gathered the previous fall to install as mulch in a flowerbed under our pawpaw trees. Since I was placing the mulch by hand, I wore a pair heavy, flannel-lined leather gloves, my favorites at the time. Thing was, as I moved forward with the task, a nick at the end of a fingernail kept catching on the flannel lining of my glove. It was just a minor annoyance, but it bugged me enough as I was working that I considered going inside and getting an emery board to smooth it out so it wouldn’t snag on the fabric anymore. However, that would involve extra steps, and I was nearly complete with the task. Still — *snag* — there it happened again. Ugh. Maybe I should go in and take care of it.

Then I noticed something: Mixed into the two-handed bunch of gathered leaf mulch I had just placed under one of the trees was a fragment of a nail polishing board. No way! Where did it even come from? It must have gone through the shredder but… the timing was astonishing. And perfect. I immediately filed down the ragged place on my fingernail and finished the job snag-free.

Of course, it could have been a coincidence. Okay, if that seems plausible, I guess one could entertain that concept. But that’s not how it felt. Thing is, I truly inhabit this place. I track my thoughts as I track my movements in the garden. I go into the garden as I re-enter a dream. It should come as no surprise that my environment would be responsive to my inner life. After all, I’m responding to my environment. Is it really that different?

Something similar happened the following year — and strangely, come to think of it, it also involved mulch. This time I was mulching the asparagus patch with shredded leaves early in the summer. To my surprise and dismay, as I filled the wheelbarrow, I accidentally dug up a clutch of turtle eggs that I didn’t know had been laid for incubation in the compost pile by a smart mama turtle. Having read that the viability of disturbed turtle eggs is low, I nonetheless decided to put them in a bucket on the south side of the house under moistened mulch. I added a spritz of water periodically for the next month and a half or so but otherwise did nothing with that bucket.  Then one day out of the blue I thought: I should check on those eggs. I did, and…against all odds, one of the eggs had a tiny hole in it, revealing a tiny blinking reptilian eye.

Witnessing the 17-hour process of that baby turtle coming into the world was a real highlight last summer. The other eggs were hollow — empty. They didn’t make it. But how come I decided to check on them right then, risking more disturbance? Of all hours of all days that had passed since I’d placed the eggs in the bucket, why then? I’m thinking there had to be a signal. Hard to say how it was transmitted, though. If there was a signal, I can only assume that the antenna to capture that signal, and the modem for interpreting it, was me.

I think part of the answer to these inquiries is that in all these examples, whether in the garden, kitchen or classroom, I’m engaged in finding ways to make things better. Asparagus spears, young people… different needs, similar mindset. What’s next in the evolving recipe? The answer starts with caring. It sources with love. And I’ve come to believe love is the carrier wave for the most important signals in life and that it connects us with our real superpowers. After hearing Joseph Chilton Pearce lecture on it in 2005, seems to me like the heart is the modem to connect with and translate these signals, and even at times a transducer capable of very wide translations of energy… including possibly even needs and desires into manifestations.

Of course, these days, seems everybody is all about the “miracle” of the internet. Images, words, dramatic scenes, music, inspiration and more come from the web. It is pretty cool at times, I’ll admit, but the way I see it, the modern internet is in fact embedded in something much older, more nuanced, better-intentioned and amazing. For all the hoopla and fanfare surrounding the overgrown weapons system (yes, that’s what both the Internet and cell phone technology started out as) the original, universal web and network is still working. The bigger web doesn’t bear the intent-damaged DNA of these other systems’ origins. It’s totally free. And if we take the time to notice, the “garden” can be anywhere we bring our love.