The other night I dreamed that I was picking my nose and pulled out a small plant. It was odd, to say the least, but is perhaps the best way I can express the internal changes my new job at a gardening company is having on me. My mind and my entire being, I suspect, are being subtly overwritten. Old parts of my identity are being cleared away and turned under. New life is springing forth in its place.

Gardening is like writing, I have been thinking. But I’ve been too tired (in a nice physical way for once) to really spin out any kind of elaborate thread of words to hold the whole thing in. When I am out there in the sun, my hands on leaves and dirt, my mind wanders, but I’m not really thinking about anything. It’s sort of a relief, really. I don’t sit around worrying about the Apocalypse, about George W. Bush (since other bushes require more immediate attention), about dissecting media manipulation or any kinds of conspiracies beyond those with roots, leaves and branches whose only esoteric goal is their own propagation.

Maybe gardening is more like editing. Deciding what to leave in and what to remove. Trying to make the whole thing seem natural. There are a number of weird head games you can get yourself into though: trying to make nature “look natural.” What could be more stupid of an objective? Why does nature need help from me to do what it’s already doing? In some ways, it feels like the work I’m doing even though it’s organic – isn’t about anything so much as it is about going against nature. Editing in an out the decisions of the land to coincide with some invisible ideal held by those living on it.

It’s a weird process that I’m still coming to grips with. In the meantime, my other garden – this website – has been growing wild. The life force that runs through it, at this point, is strong and vibrant and barely needs me at the helm. I’ve come to recognize that I’m merely tapping into it, providing a conduit for some essence, some energy, to flow through. The fruits and vegetables grown here attract others who add to the soil’s richness and cross-pollinate ideas to the four winds.

I find myself missing the ability to actively cultivate and participate in the conversations which spring up around my post (my home internet won’t be installed till Tuesday). I realize how much “pruning” I do with our conversations – taking the wild forms that grow up here, shaping and defining them in particular directions.

I also find myself strangely alienated from the other me who wrote all the articles which have been publishing automatically this past week, and will continue till the end of this month when I fall into my new groove. The me who became obsessed with unraveling the philosophical implications of science in the realm of conspiracy theory has yet to fuse back together with the me who has been hoisting garbage cans full of yard debris into the bed of a white F250 this past week. I know we’re all the same person somewhere and I expect when we come together again, it will be interesting and important. But until then, I am living underground (literally, I just moved into a basement room in a new house too), allowing something both foreign and oddly familiar to germinate inside of me. A coworker joked randomly about me having been a farmer in a past life.

It’s hard to say much about that, but I believe the plant spirits have been communicating with me. But they don’t speak in words and their language is slow and crawling. But it grows inside us easily and naturally. Our bodies, after all, consist of delicate inter-penetrating roots and branches. Nerves and blood vessels and all the rest – to speak nothing of the way our thoughts fork off and grow skyward inside and around us. We are nothing if not plants clothed in flesh, set free to colonize far off soils with the seeds of our creations.

Before I lay down for the night, I wanted to share a quote I read today in a book I picked up by Michael Pollan (author of the Botany of Desire - has anybody read that?), called Second Nature. In it, the author sort of uses gardening as a framework to tell stories about his own life and about America and nature as a whole. It’s really awesome and funny. Anyway, on page 64, he writes:

Gardens also teach the necessary if un-American lesson that nature and culture can be compromised, that there might be some middle ground between the lawn and the forest – between those who would complete the conquest of the planet in the name of progress, and those who believe it’s time we abdicated our rule and left the earth in the care of its more innocent species. The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet halfway.

That’s a nice summation of part of the reason I took this job in the first place – to strike some kind of balance; to get in touch with something, without losing touch with everything else that brought me here. Just where here is though, I’m still not quite sure. But I suspect standing in the sun and dirt all day might make such abstract questions a bit more concrete. That is, if I can pull all these plants out of my nose… Still not sure what the hell that’s about!