I'd Rather Be Garden

saying no with pleasure, ChatGPT virgin, rearranging self-reliance

Boyfriend and I finally started a garden—a project we’ve circled for years. Gardens take time, thought, planning. An understanding of seasons, a certain amount of predicting the future.

My grandmother wrote a book about gardening back in the 90s. A few years ago, she sent me her old copy, the cover photo speckled white with time. She’s there, kneeling in a garden I never visited in Idyllwild. Mile high on a mountain top. Smiling of course, why wouldn’t you smile in a garden? I wanted to follow this book’s instruction. Fostering a connection between generations, healing the unspoken fray with action.

Yes, I will plant the garden and send her a picture—look what I did under your book’s tutelage! She’d love to know I put her book into practice—almost as much as she’d love to see me using a vocab word like tutelage. Double-win. I didn’t go to a four year college, I hardly made it through two years at community. This was the right path for me, but still, when I see college students with their backpacks and drive, some side channel in my mind wonders what is it like to be that grown up? My grandmother wanted me to go to college, maybe Sarah Lawrence? She didn’t graduate herself, but she married two professors, back to back. Study is important. Instead I split off and took a 200 hour yoga teacher course.

The gardening book thing was also a personal test. Could I build something out of earth, guided by ink on paper? Following a garden-by-numbers YouTube tutorial left me flaccid. Some in my position might turn to ChatGPT. Ask the machine learning algorithm for the perfect dirt plot based on my exact geographic location. Sounds nice, sounds too easy. I’ve never opened ChatGPT. I skate by the Gemini answers on Google—they’re hardly helpful anyway.

If I’m going to allocate water with my actions, I’d rather it go into plants. I can foster a garden or the neural network of generative AI. Both feed water into a being. You could take this as a metaphor, but it’s not. I watch people try to dialogue in the comments. People telling other people to Google it. Those people say they have. We are getting different results.

I do my best to calculate the risks. Boyfriend and I have cut way back on alcohol. I didn’t have a sip till I was 20—beer pong in the laundry room of an apartment complex. Warm amber slush. I like to have a drink, but I’m still so sensitive to the stuff. When the fires turned much of Los Angeles into an evacuation warning, I couldn’t fathom a drink. The fires were literally sobering. I’d rather have a clear mind, a steady hand to pack the car, a strong grip on the steering wheel. Some things you wanna see with your own eyes. You want to be able to scan the horizon for predators. You want to catch the divine breaking in the mornings, scattering light on the leaves.

Maybe I want to drink water because water makes me human. Makes me an alive being, like the plants. Like the AI, too, maybe. I’m not cutting alcohol forever because I also know what it feels like to say no over and over out of fear. I want pleasure to guide me and now, pleasure usually asks for hot tea or bubbly water with yuzu concentrate. I am not saying no to ChatGPT out of fear, but because I want everything I make to be mine. Imperfect by my nature. I love the fact that I can have a sad spell, that I can go to sleep crying. The next week I wake up unable to contain the delight inherent within the threads of morning. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds—Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that in his 1841 essay Self-Reliance and it still hits.

Emerson changed my life, no joke. Gave me permission to be messy and take chances. I read Emerson at community college, alongside Walt Whitman. Whitman taught me to hold all mess as sacred.

Gardens are inherently messy with all that dirt. The tangled sinewy roots gather at the bottom of the store bought plastic pot. You have to break up the soil, shake up the space between roots before they can embrace the vastness. And within that chaos is the order of things. The distance charted between each little plant. How much sun, how much moisture. Tending, but not overly so. I wanted perfection in my execution, dancing between the fear of not doing and the desire to cradle a bundle of loose roots, gently tucking them into soil. Gently rearranging my own cells. Getting different results.

I was reluctant to put my grandmother’s book to the side, but it’s dense and the charts are confusing to a brain like mine. Boyfriend was confident we could just ask a person for help. All impromptu, let’s see what happens. There’s a little place called Fig Earth Supply not more than 15 minutes from our home. Bumped by the bright balm of Sunday, we drove over. I prepared for the unknown. We might plant a garden today.

A young kid in a canvas apron spotted our clueless auras right away. He squinted into the sun as he walked up to us, light brushes of hair dancing on his cheeks.

Lemme know if you need help finding anything specific.

This was our chance.

Actually, yes we’re trying to…have a garden. To start one.

He showed us where to find the herbs, the lettuces, the broccolini. Assured us the store was stocked only with plants in season. If it’s here, we can put it in the earth today. He spoke of tomato season with a dreamy longing. It wasn’t difficult for him to share this knowledge. We lapped it up, fast and grateful. He nodded and drifted towards another pair of gardening wannabes. I didn’t need to know a keyword or enter my zip code. Everything was just there. Between my thumb and forefinger, I smudged a mint leaf to get that sweet smell. We collected cilantro, parsley, rosemary, sage. Some baby bok choy, arugula and broccolini. Marigold and calendula flowers for the bees.

The truth is, we always have to start somewhere. My path to self-reliance has grown its own roots and branches. Found that individualism cannot truly sustain. I want to have a big swatch of earth with vegetables and maybe some fruit trees and definitely blueberry bushes. And you can come, with thumb and forefinger, take some food to eat. Stay a while, hold the mug of coffee I give you in the morning. Have some space to think those new wisp thoughts. I will tell you, we know everything, we are just remembering. We are each other’s shelter. We are each other’s riches.

This space lives in my mind, maybe in some universe I’m already there.

For now I water the plants in the garden box, consider them alive. Consider what I’m choosing to feed on. Hopefully all the greenery will thrive—the raccoons won’t break the chicken wire, random bugs won’t feast before we can. You can see this as metaphor or not. I could take a giant ladle to my lips, brim spilling with worry. Hits acidic in the gut, never enough to fill me. Instead I’ll close my eyes and ask for guidance, call out by name. Patient, I wait for a response. Maternal great grandmother, paternal grandmother. Things spill across my vision, I pay attention. Here we are, we dream together.

Start here. Water the plants in the garden box. I’m not in control of all these little beings. Growing is not the same as generating. The process is dotted with flourishes I cannot begin to decode. Time and sun, water and dirt. That’s all I know.

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