Why Gardening Is Good For My Soul

It started when I was a kid. This infatuation with living organisms coming out of the ground, that is. In contrast to the stale existence of what media would feed me each day in the form of popular after school shows about high school drama, I found something intriguing, if not positively addicting, about plants. They were unpredictable and wild. Each day you paid them a visit, you were in for a surprise. One plant could have grown a few inches overnight. Another may have a previously unseen fruit that seemed to pop out of nowhere. Maybe I had gone away for a weekend and returned to find the worst… I writhing pile of shriveled up brown mess. The remains to a plant that once was, before dying the painful death of dehydration.

So, that’s where it started. 

Now, I’m an adult with a wife and two kids… and a backyard that beckons me with crazy possibilities. Although I sit in my home office day in and day out staring endlessly at pixels on a 24 inch wide high-def monitor, the land outside won’t let me go. It pierces through the windows that keep me pleasantly air conditioned at 78 degrees and pulls my attention away from work and social media and wasted time and striving for things that are temporary.

As a 28 year old adult, it’s here… in my garden… barefoot with dirt caked in the crevices of my fingers and toes that I find substance. That I feel connected to something larger… a rhythm that has softly marched through ages past. A cycle of death and life, sowing and harvesting.

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This is an excerpt of a piece written for TRIAD Magazine (read full post there).  If you haven’t spent some time with TRIAD, you totally should! So much great content by wonderful, soulful collaborators.