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I didn’t grow much of a garden this year. I was growing something much more important.

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I crouched in the neglected garden, saplings rising to eye level—tall enough to mark the seasons I had let it go. I pulled weeds in the hot sun, watching her from the corner of my eye.

She sat on a small pile of leaves, holding a yellow wildflower in her hand—or a weed, depending on where it grows, or who is looking at it. After admiring the color for a moment, she stuffed it in her mouth.

She looked at me, a smile erupting wider than her face, and laughed. I laughed back. Then she kept exploring in the dappled sunlight beneath the big oak tree.

Next it was an old oak leaf. Then it was a stick, which she turned over and over in her hands as if studying it, before tasting it too.

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There is a kind of passive learning that happens this way.

Learning that is not instructed nor structured—just felt.

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Little hands in the dirt.
Curious objects, studied with all five senses.
A child meeting their world directly, their own teacher.

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In those early years, the body is doing quiet work—undergoing constant adaptations, learning, responding, and growing within its environment.

But it’s not just the body that is shaped.

A perspective is forming too.

A child let to play in a garden learns a familiarity. Comfort. Connection—

an understanding that the world is not separate from them, but something they belong to.

And this kind of learning asks very little of the garden.

Not perfection. Not order. Not even productivity.

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The garden, in many seasons, is approached as something for output.

If it is ornamental, it must be carefully maintained—beauty and order the goal. If it is for food, it must yield something useful.

But what about the seasons when life isn’t visibly productive?
Is a garden still worth keeping?
Or would we be better off replacing it with something orderly—like grass?

When food can be bought, and time is limited, a garden can begin to feel unnecessary.

When food can be bought, and time is limited, a garden can begin to feel unnecessary.

But the value of a garden is not limited to what it produces.

Even now, in its overgrown state, it offers something.

From the weedy beds, volunteers have appeared—oak and tallow, elderberries and mulberries, among others. Unplanned, but not without purpose.

And for a child, this kind of garden holds something more.

A place for little hands to dig.
A place to find crawly friends.
A place to toss seeds—or plant an acorn.
A place to pick wildflowers for mom—
or eat them.

Beneath the visible disorder, there is still an order that supports life—of itself, and of those who move through it.

And in that space, something else is being cultivated.

The garden becomes a place of orientation—

toward patience,
toward care,
toward belonging,
toward connection.

Not just a place to grow food,
but a place to grow in relationship with the living world.

Even in seasons when it looks like nothing is being produced, something essential still is.

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We were outside in the late afternoon light.

“Do you hear that whooshing sound?” I asked.

Her little face paused and her gaze went distant. After a moment, she said, “Yes, what is that?”

“That’s the ocean,” I told her. “It’s a whole mile away, but we can still hear the waves from here.”

Her expression instantly lifted. It felt like a small moment of magic—knowing that her friend, the ocean, was with her even from a distance.

I wondered how many of our neighbors had ever noticed that far off crashing of the waves against the beach. How many had consciously heard it—and how many had unknowingly tuned it out as part of the hum of the city?

It is hard to notice something distant and constant like that when your attention is pulled toward brighter, louder things—phones, music, screens. Noise layered on top of noise.

And there was a time when I don’t think I heard it either.

I was a late bloomer to social media, but once I adopted it, I went all in—scrolling, creating, fully participating. I’ve been off Instagram for a couple of years now, and I can see how numb I had become—
to the rustle of the wind,
to the light in the trees,
to the simple miracle of breathing fresh air.

The natural world—and even the human one—is full of subtlety.

Small details, almost hidden, like little Easter eggs scattered throughout the day. They have the power to ground you, to bring a sense of peace or even wonder—if you notice them.

But noticing takes practice. It takes presence. And it’s a skill we don’t often use anymore.

Our attention has become fragmented—pulled in a hundred directions at once. Any silence is considered a problem to solve, and we seek to replace every slow moment with something faster.

This matters more than we think.

What we notice becomes the texture of our lives. We can choose to notice the smaller, everyday moments of magic, like a child full of wonder, noticing the ocean’s distant roar. Or we can choose to only consume things that don’t ask us to slow down, that just arrive at the speed of light. That we sometimes didn’t even want to notice anyway.

When our attention is scattered, our days feel scattered. When it is steady, even ordinary moments begin to feel full and grounded.

It’s not that we’ve lost the skill. We’ve just lost the habit. But we can rebuild it.

It can start with something small—
taking a walk without headphones,
eating a meal outside,
letting your mind settle long enough to notice what’s already there.

It can look like listening fully when someone speaks, or allowing yourself to wait—standing in line, sitting in a waiting room—without reaching for a screen.

Even a few moments of stillness, however uncomfortable, can begin to bring your attention back.

The ocean is humming, whether we hear it or not.

So much of life is like that—steady, present, waiting to be noticed.

Maybe the fullness of life isn’t about adding anything new.

Maybe it’s about returning to what has been there all along.

Like a sound in the distance.
A moment of stillness.
Pausing long enough to hear something we’ve forgotten how to notice.

What a garden reveals about connection and participation

With my hand wrapped around the root ball, I felt a moment of resistance—then a soft pop as the weeds gave way. As the clump lifted from the ground, an earthworm surfaced briefly before slipping back into the soil, disappearing into the cool, dark below.

It was simply returning to its work.

Not work as we understand it—no schedule, no striving. It does not question its role or reach beyond it. It simply lives. And in living the way it was made to, it contributes to the flourishing of everything around it.

Beneath the surface of the garden, it moves quietly—loosening the soil, creating space for air and water, making it easier for roots to grow.

Each year, the live oak overhead sheds its leaves. We rake them into the garden, where they settle, soften, and begin to break down.

The earthworm has its feast.

What has fallen is carried back into the soil, returned to the place it is needed most. Over time, what was once dry and scattered becomes rich, living ground.

And from that ground, something else emerges.

The orange tops of carrots push through the soil. I reach down and pull—another familiar pop as the root comes free. With a quick rinse from the hose, the dirt is gone and the carrot is clean enough to eat.

My daughter always gets the first one.

She bites into it with delight, standing barefoot in the soil, unaware of everything beneath her that made that moment possible.

I don’t explain it to her. I simply point out what is ready—another carrot, a radish, the first signs of berries forming nearby.

From her eyes, it is simple: dirt, a seed, some water, and then a vegetable.

But beneath that simplicity is a quiet cooperation—countless unseen parts working together, each contributing in its own way.

The garden does not flourish through control.

It flourishes through participation.

And yet, in many ways, we have moved away from this kind of relationship.

We can eat almost anything, at any time—food grown far away, in seasons that are not our own. It is a remarkable system, one that offers convenience, stability, and abundance.

But it also creates distance.

Food becomes something we access, rather than something we are connected to.

The process fades from view.

The earthworm offers a quieter model.

It does not seek more than what is already present. It participates in what is given—what has fallen—and in doing so, helps sustain the life around it.

There is something to learn in that.

Not as a rejection of the systems we rely on, but as an invitation to step back into relationship, even in small ways.

For me, it looks like this.

On a warm afternoon, I sit at the picnic table while my children play nearby, their laughter rising and falling in the background. I chop tomatoes and onions from the farmers market, cilantro from the garden, garlic and lime from the store, mixing it all together for a bowl of pico de gallo.

It isn’t perfect. It isn’t entirely local. It isn’t all from my own hands.

But it is connected.

Connected to the people who grew the food, whose faces I see each week. Connected to the soil just beyond the table, where something is always growing, always changing.

Not separate. Not self-contained. But part of something larger.

It doesn’t require a complete return—just a small re-entry.

A few herbs in the yard. A tomato plant. A walk through the farmers market, choosing what is in season and building a meal around it.

Small ways of participating.

Small ways of remembering.

The garden may never be perfectly kept. The systems we rely on may never be perfectly aligned. There will always be trade-offs, limitations, complexity.

But something shifts when we move a little closer—when we take part, rather than remain removed.

The earthworm does not transform the garden all at once.

It works slowly, steadily, within the small patch of ground it inhabits.

And yet, without it, the garden would not flourish.