planting trees.

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I’ve always dreamed of planting trees and gardening somewhere forlorn, where attention is never deep and nurturing enough. Back when I was seventeen, I’d look for places around me to garden, and I’d find myself chasing dreams every Friday during my long walks around the city. 


I never knew why I wanted to garden so much, but I just knew that the child-like spirit in me always lived in the wilderness. A picture of me when I was four years old, crouching by the sand, daisies in my hair and a water bucket in my hand always haunted me. This was the truest me.



And now I’m almost 24, and this dream came alive. I desperately longed for it ever since I was in university, but it was just never the right time. There was a distance that had to be covered traipsing up towards it. I gazed lovingly at my life intentions list on my bulletin board and surrendered it’s happening.




I had to go through so much to garden with reverence.


The sacredness of the experience is humbling. Somehow, one needs to dissolve pride to truly feel it. I needed to go through the pain of nothingness, surrendering myself to death and timeless, soulful service for life around me in order to truly understand the depth of the experience.


It is not simply digging to the ground and shovelling back dirt onto the roots. It is selflessness. It’s giving unconditionally to life. It’s reverence for the seasons. It’s acceptance of the time things need to take to truly grow without intervention and control.



I’m grateful I never planted a tree before. Acts of kindness need to be done with so much veneration. One needs to transcend form to truly give.


When it was done, there was this silence. The silence of not knowing if the tree would live. The silence of faith and contentment. The silence of not feeling the body, and becoming some kind of a formless shred of light that just surrendered itself to the unfinished work we’ll all have to do.



I went back to work and then there were miracles. Miracles of so much love being given back to me. A graceful fulfilment that makes me want to cry out of helplessness and the deepest shades of gratitude ripping my chest apart, opening my heart to the expansiveness of being a nobody.


The rest has just begun.


27.02.2022

going with grace in an inscrutable world.

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