Magic Within Every Garden: Sharing the Love

One day, afer a particularly frustrating bout in the garden trying to “control” an “invasion” of mugwort, I decided to see if I could do a shamanic journey to understand what, if anything, this plant was trying to communicate to me. (A shamanic journey is a drug-free way of going inward to seek understanding of the outer world by speaking directly with spirit in other realities. I’ll explain more about journeying in a moment or two.) That experience was transformative. Fascinating. Illuminating. It made me want to journey to com- municate with all the other beings in my yard that annoyed me, and that I needed or wanted to understand better.

The idea for this book came from that experience. What if, I thought, I combine my experience as a gardener, where my roots have spread and deepened and connected me to Earth, with what I have learned as a journeyer, where I have soared to other worlds? One of the things we learn when we journey is that the best way to honor the spirits who guide us is to listen and show that we heard their message. Writing a book felt like the best way I could honor them.

It was exciting to think about writing that book, but terrifying to imagine sharing it with the world. This was not the kind of thing I felt comfortable talking about with people. Except my kids, and yes, they think I’m weird. But I’m getting too old to worry about what other people think of me. The path started opening before me, and I couldn’t help but follow to see where it led. The more I started talking with people about shamanic journeys, the more they shared with me about their own similar experiences and deep curiosity. It wasn’t that scary after all.

Getting to Our Roots & Learning to Love

We all started in a garden. Whether you believe in the biblical Garden of Eden or the theory of evolution (or both), our roots are in nature, in learning about the world around us through the plants and animals that sustain us, the rocks and trees that shelter us, and the waters that quench our bodies and souls. If we can overcome our fears and learn to see nature as a friend and ally, what is then possible? If we can transform our annoyance with plants, animals, and insects we regard as pests into love and appreciation for them, how might our whole world change? Could we transform this dystopian mental death spiral that has trapped so many people, changing it into a cycle of upward evolution and cooperation? Perhaps it’s possible to course-correct our seeming environmental human plane crash by learning to love those things that frighten and annoy us.