An Inclusive View on Nature and Gardening

A month ago I developed a more elaborate workshop natural gardening. It was for the Queer Garden Week at Terra Rosa near Barcelona. Workshops evolve, just like nature and my last workshop is at the pinnacle of this evolution. Professionally we grow, we evolve, just like all life around us. Interesting to see that we still set ourselves apart from nature. This article is based on my workshops and is about reshaping the ways we look at ourselves and nature, or, as I sometimes like to call it, 'the more-than-human world'.

I will use several ideas and theories to make my point that we are an integral part of the more than human world and that setting ourselves apart tells us that we lost our connection to life, and, in a sense, is an arrogant assumption that led to the exploitation of our natural world. The cliche sentence is to say: 'we have only one world'. But cliches are often true. Reshaping the ways we look to ourselves in relation to nature are pivotal for the generations to come to use, work with, eat from and enjoy the natural world around us. The survival of the species is dependent upon our ability to change our relationship with the planet.

But it is not only about survival. In this article I will also show that nature can give meaning to our lives, that we can play with it and enjoy it in a profound way. It is finding our way back home, so to speak. By arguing we are nature, which goes even further than 'we are part of nature', we take in our rightfull place in the earth's complex ecosystems.

In order to make my statement, and hopefully am able to offer the reader (that's you!), I will use the wisdom of several theories and insights I had myself. These wisdom perspectives are:

• Being unique

• Community

• Queer ecology

• Native wisdom

Being unique

All life on earth is temporal. We are born, live and die. Death is relative, because all matter transforms from one form into another helped by funghi and bacteria. If my body dies, all its material will be composted and reused for plants, air, water, birds and all other life. In a way my body does not die, but transforms. This insight helped me to loose my fear for death. But more than life just being temporal, every manifestation of life is unique. Yes, there are species, but every individual member of a species, including humanity, is unique. It never existed before and will, after dying, never exist anymore. This is why I consider uniqueness to be a precious gift of life. We are all unique in the most diverse way. Understanding this might help to value diversity and become less fearfull for everything that is not abiding the dictatorship of monoculture. We are not monoculture. We are a colorful, divers, from the dual extremes and everything in between. By realizing this, I hope that the fear and hatred towards 'the other' fades away, whether it considers the LGTBQ+ community or people with a different religion, political view, culture, complexion, skin color and physical ability. We are as colorful and divers as nature itself.

Queer ecology

A theory that supports this perspective of seeing all beings as unique, is queer ecology. In my surroundings and in my work I often get the question: Why queer! People see queer as a political statement (which it can be) and alien to their respective ways of seeing things. There is always a pinch of fear in the way they address me, because in general so little is known about the queer or LGTBQ+ community. But as Priya Subberwal rightfully states:

“Queerness in ecology is a concept broader than sexuality or gender identity. It is an all encompassing wink to the weirdness in the more-than-human world, and serves as an alternative to the binary and reductive modes of thought in which so many of us have been trained.”

The gift of queer ecology is that it recognizes the diversity of forms, also considering sexual orientation and gender identity, that makes our planet such a beautiful place. Every individual member of any species is unique in its expression and form. No tree is the same, no bird is the same, no human is the same. To look through the glasses of queer ecology is to see and appreciate diversity, the colorfulness, the beautiful weirdness of all its expressions. Life is not so straight-forward as we tend to believe. Dualities exist, yes, but also everything in-between. By using queer ecology we rediscover our sense of beauty, inclusion and curiosity. Nature becomes alive, so to speak. It has always been alive but we forgot to see it. Our minds have become dull and death, as a matter of speech.

Native Wisdom

To relearn to connect to ourselves, the other and nature, we will have to start to use other ways of learning, which are physical sensing, emotional feeling and the connecting with Spirit. In her book "Braiding Sweetgrass", Robin Val Kimmerer quotes a Native American wisdom keeper that says that making sense of our world using the mind is okay, but impaired. Lived knowledge comes through all four forms of making sense of our world.

Moreover, according to many indigenous people, all life is sentient and has a soul. Trees and animals are relatives, which is confirmed by biology, even plants, funghi and animals, including us, have a common ancestor in a far away past. This perspective leads to what is called 'place specific knowledge'. People know the land, of what it is capable of and what not, and respect the ways ecosystems work. Our globalized agricultural monocultures neglect and damage existing ecosystems, place specific knowledge cooperates with ecosystms. I find the perspective deliciously anarchist. Not the big companies decide to exploit the land, but grassroot initiatives are taken by people that do know the land. Native wisdom in gardening is playing with nature and cooperating with it, rather than forcing it into a certain shape that is both destructive and oftentimes ugly. This playfulness is very much in line with queer ecology, because within the queer community play is valued a lot. We are homo ludens (the playfull beings).

Community

David Graeber and David Wengrow discuss in their book "The Dawning of Everything: A New History of Humanity" the dawn of agriculture around 10.000 years ago, but they prefer to call the first farmers gardeners instead. Gardeners, according to them, in contrast with farmers, make use of the opportunities that nature offers them. It's a much more relaxed and playfull view on the production of food than farmers that need to plough, sow, weed, and fight bugs and diseases. Farming is about control. Gardening is about cooperation. This playful approach of gardening is in line with both the native wisdom perspective and queer ecology. It's also a way to connect with the more-than-human world. Playing with Mother Nature is an excellent way to connect with other human beings. Gardening creates bonds. Gardening contributes to the development or maintenance of community. We are a social species, and thus our highly individualized societies are unhealthy for us. We need to be able to intimately feel connected, not only to ourselves, but with the other and nature as well. In creating community, gardening is a great tool.

In finding our way back home, that is to connect to ourselves on a physical, emotional and spiritual level, to another human being and our more-than-human world, we need to see ourselves, the other and nature in a different light. Our bodies, for example, are perfectly adapted to a certain degree of wildness, adventure and play. Our heart tells us what helps us and the whole, whether it is an ecosystem or our communities. Our intuition informs us what is the right course of action in daily life and Spirit gives us the abundance of diversity, cooperation and evolution, both on an individual and (inter)species/ecosystem level. This path offers us meaning, a thing we so miss in our current lives. We can find our Gardens of Eden back, even in the cities, by creating gardens together. We are not seperated from the rest, we are nature!

Play with me. Be curious with me. Evolve with me. Let go of the fear for otherness and wildness. Let go of control and start listening.

Wende