Gardening as if the God in All Life Mattered (Introduction)

How does an everyday citizen help regenerate the planet? This question has been on my mind since 1985. As a gardener, I had a great deal of knowledge in soil science and knew that most of the carbon in our atmosphere could be safely sequestered in the soil. I also understood that changing our agricultural methods to organic, low till methods would be part of that solution. In a world where climate catastrophes are now incontrovertibly happening, and people are acknowledging climate change as real, what is a gardener and educator to do? In the following paper, I propose that the landscaping, gardening, and lifestyle choices we make will lead us to sustainable solutions that will collectively heal the atmosphere, and heal our psyches from collective trauma.

The question of “What are we to do?” has been concerning me for decades as I have watched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) reports become more and more dire. It is like a panel of doctors telling the people of the planet, “We have good news and bad news. The good news is we can slow global warming. The bad news is that we have to change things really quickly.” While industry and governments have made some moves toward a more conscious relationship with our planet, it is decidedly not enough, and we must look to psychology to help us examine, and change, our behaviors in a very short period of time.

From an ecopsychological perspective, “keep gardening” is the message. In my search for answers to our global crises, ecopsychology offers a great many answers. In the following pages, I will share some of those. When I am in my garden meditating with the plants or listening to podcasts on social justice and reforestation projects, I feel connected to other humans. While I am thinking and breathing on the planet, I am contributing to the network of human relational patterns, just like a mycelial network of trees exchanging nutrients with the humus and biota underneath. In my experience, echoed in the perspectives of other modern philosophers and psychologists, there is an understanding that “God” is in all life, and science is just beginning to understand what mystics and indigenous cultures have understood and passed down for generations. Now that we are collectively facing a climate crisis of apocalyptic proportions, the psychological impact of climate change on humans finds us realizing that there aren’t nearly enough therapists and mental health workers in the world to heal the people in need of help. However, there is enough nature to go around if we save what is left of it. In the prophetic words of Theodore Roszak (1995), “Ecology needs psychology, and psychology needs ecology” (p. 5)

Ecopsychology helped me grieve what has already been lost on the planet and realize how I naturally turned my grieving process into a measure of what Buddhist scholar and Environmental Activist Joanna Macy calls Active Hope:

“Active Hope is a practice. Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have. It is a process we can apply to any situation, and it involves three key steps. First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we’d like things to move in or the values we’d like to see expressed, and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction.” (Macy, 2012, p. 3)

Perhaps that was what I had already been doing, but there is so much still more to be done, as our climate crisis will become worse and worse until enough of us help to turn it around. Before I entered the Ecopychology program at Naropa University, I wasn’t sure how humans could possibly turn it around.

At the beginning of my journey at Naropa University, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s initial teaching to me on the land at the Drala center came in the form of a young man in a t-shirt and the words “Basically Good,” on it. Perhaps it was my consumerist way of learning about the world, but it opened my heart about myself. Yes. I am “basically good.” I suppose. I would have to think about that. Somehow I felt like as a consuming carbon based life form I was inherently basically a wrongdoer, somehow. But Trungpa Rinpoche’s words from Shambala Path of the Warrior (1984) were heartening: “If we are willing to take an unbiased look, we will find that, in spite of all our problems and confusion, all our emotional and psychological ups and downs, there is something basically good about our existence as human beings. We have moments of basic non-agression and freshness…it is worthwhile to take advantage of these moments…we have an actual connection to reality that can wake us up and make us feel basically, fundamentally good” (Trungpa, 1984. pp. 29-31)

Well, if I examined it with an “unbiased look,”the truth is, humans just got it wrong with the tilling.

We’ve all contributed to global warming in one way or another. Was the human relationship with the earth “Basically Good”? There I was shopping. Feeling slightly guilty, I would have to plant a tree later since some airplane probably brought my tshirt from China. And there I was, re-examining my relationship with myself and the earth. And, here in the bookshop at the Drala Center in Colorado I picked up a brand new copy of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Trungpa, 1984). It had been twenty years since I had read it.

We are in the process of re-examining our relationships: with water, land, religion, and ultimately, each other. What if, in this time when we need to re-examine our relationship with the “other than human” world, we could create wildlife-friendly cities, human-friendly cities, and farm-friendly cities, collectively? What impact would that have on our human and climate crises? Are we ready to work toward that end, together, to heal? Ecopsychology offers solutions to worldwide crises by providing every global citizen the opportunity to be healed by nature, and, in turn, to help heal nature.

Ecopsychology, like permaculture, works on solving problems by working on many levels, with patience, with healing, and with connection to nature as the outcome. With its roots in transpersonal psychology, Ecopsychology recognizes life force, the “flow of prana,” or “Holy Spirit,” “authentic presence,” or “kundalini.” - it is known by many names. Leslie Temple-Thurston, my mentor and spiritual teacher since 1995, referred to it as “Source.” For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to this mystery as “God.” All the religions and cultures of the world recognize this phenomenon. At this time of multiple global crises, humans need to behave as if God matters in everything that we do. The work of Machaelle Small Wright was one of the earliest gardeners to address this in her book Behaving as if the God in All Life Mattered (1992) She had felt these “vague energies” when working in the garden, or walking in the forest. She felt compelled to read The Findhorn Garden (1975), where Dorothy Maclean realized the plant devas were speaking to her. Peter and Eileen Caddy, the garden’s cofounders, followed the instructions carefully, and the results were astounding. Small Wright was inspired and recognized that was what she wanted to do at Perelandra Garden in Virginia.

“What I had felt in the woods was a life force that was now identified and could be worked with consciously. I saw that any goal of achieving an ecologically balanced whole at Perelandra lay in my willingness to work with these nature intelligences—these devas and nature spirits.” (p. 107) Wright goes on to explain that people experience devas and nature spirits differently, depending on their background, but they were really the ones at work in the world of nature. What if everyone could sense the life in a carrot or a flower and be able to “hear” what it needed? Would it change our perspective?

By gardening our cities and suburbs as if the spirit infused in all life mattered, creating ecologically balanced gardens, we could increase thermal buffering, create local food forests, and provide transformational, regenerative contact with the more-than-human world, reconnecting humans to the more-than-human life on earth. The act of reconnecting humans to the more-than-human life on earth will take time, as does tending any garden that has been neglected or abused. But if we consciously create the future together, we can end the climate crisis in one generation (Hawken, 2020).

This is gardening the future together.

“We are now in the early stages of a sustainability revolution that has the magnitude of the industrial revolution and the speed of the technological revolution.”

-Al Gore, UN Climate Change Conference, 2022 (#COP27)

Terra Linda Pittenger

Naropa University, 2023