Photo by avijit bouri / Alamy Stock Photo

I can trace my love of gardening to my early years observing and helping my Mom use the gift of a ‘green thumb’ to create our home’s luscious gardens. Today, as an avid gardener, I know firsthand the commitment, consistency of labour and effort, and the care and love required to bring the vision of my garden to life. 

Novice and expert gardeners alike know that gardening is a mixed endeavour of rewards and disappointments. I savour the rewards and take a deep breath when disappointed that things don't turn out as desired.  

It is not unusual to reap plant varieties one never planted.  These unexpected gifts are sometimes welcomed and oftentimes not.  One welcomed gift appeared in the summer of 2020, a summer defined by global indignation, uprising, and protest at the killing of Geoge Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of a police officer and sobered by the crisis and uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting cases of death and infection levels. With shutdowns and shelter-in-place edict, I spent much of my time in my garden, where I found salve and respite from the consuming fear, speculation, and anxiety that engulfed the world.

From my front porch, I noticed several shoots of an unknown plant growing on my lawn, just under the sprawling Japanese maple—a gift to our household from my niece and nephew. My curiosity got the best of me, so I resisted the urge to pull out this mysterious growth from my carefully planned garden. My neighbor suggested that it might be milkweed. After checking the foliage on a plant identification app, I confirmed that the budding sprouts were indeed milkweed.

Milkweed has an elegant, tall growth pattern with glorious clusters of pink flowers approaching the plant's apex. Up to that point, my only association with milkweed came from the 2013 #gotmilkweed campaign by the David Suzuki Foundation, encouraging Toronto residents to plant milkweed to provide a feeding habitat for the migrating rapidly declining population of eastern monarch butterflies, whose survival depends on the plant. I don’t recall responding to the campaign with a financial donation, but obviously, the message stuck. Seven years after that campaign, the milkweed made its way to my garden. 

Summer 2020 – Caterpillar on Milkweed plant
Photo credit – Nicole Salmon

And an incredible gift it has been; my garden is abundantly reseeded every year. 

The flowers transform into pods, with each pod housing many seeds.  Because the milkweed came to my garden as an unexpected yet beautiful gift, sharing my garden’s milkweed bounty by allowing the pods to mature, open, and seeds taken by the wind reminds me that, in a small way, I am a part of the monarch butterfly’s story and they are a part of mine. The seeds of their survival were a gift to my garden, which is my solace, joy, and pleasure. I choose to nurture the continuing circulation of this abundant gift.

So, what can I pull from my experience with milkweed to inform how I respond to the rise of a disturbing and brutish social environment aimed to overwhelm and dull sensibilities, crushing them under its weight towards defeat and submission?

In my January blog, I wrote about allowing my body to take cues from the natural environment by aligning and tapping into the wisdom of seasonal cycles. It was a recognition of the connection between bodily and seasonal rhythms.  If, as a human species, we believe and embody such a direct connection, would the adage ‘what goes around comes around’ cause us to act and behave differently?  

We have become adept at ‘throwing stones’ elsewhere without expecting or recognizing that, as with a boomerang, our ripples will return to where we stand. Collectively, the results of our actions, inactions, decisions, and behaviours will impact all of us, yet arrogance and disdain are potent and effective blindfolds.

When populations of indicator species pointing to the health of an ecosystem begin to dwindle in numbers, like the monarch butterfly, the wisest interpretation is that it’s a warning and harbinger of pending crisis and disaster. When vast populations of people, those who have been dehumanized, disenfranchised, and brutalized, give fair warning that all isn’t well, the best course of action is to heed, acknowledge, and take measures to halt and reverse the trend and thereby address the warnings.  When leaders conjure and perpetrate lies and disinformation and take action to reinforce myths and express nostalgia to roll back gains or maintain systems of injustice, the ripples roll out and back, affecting us all.

“All Flourishing is Mutual.” That’s the opening line in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. I will take it further, “All Destruction and Brutality are Mutual.” That’s the undeniably true ‘roll-back’ history and trajectory of the current path few, with super-inflated egos and power, rabidly pursue, while many unawake disciples, acting the groupie, merrily follow along. We have actively and passively designed and created a world that ignores and denies the mutuality and the symbiotic nature of our co-existence as living and non-living species. The path leads to our collective demise, where all the power, might, and money will never be enough to buy exemption and render one untouchable. Those highly coveted currencies will be deemed useless.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ~ Martin Luther King

Hope and light illuminate another path as we descend further into the darkness of the current path. We have entered a new, treacherously alarming chamber warning of challenging times. There is no sugar-coating the dangerous period in front of us. Sure, some groups are already feeling the stank breath of harm, while others are behind, smug and oblivious, that they, too, are clearly in the line of harm's crosshairs. Can this period of crisis serve up unexpected gifts?

Absolutely!

I say this with the same confidence I have in the coming spring thaw: my garden will be set abloom with an abundance of new and spreading milkweed plants. I will feel rejuvenated and committed to the work, care, and love needed to nurture an abundant garden and its spillover effects of a new, better vision of the world.

How about you? Can you see it? Can you feel it?

We reap what we allow and sow. How will your continuing actions through these challenging times sow the seeds of an abundant reap?