A garden is born.
A Garden is Born
Before 2020, my wife Michelle and I dreamed of turning our front yard into a butterfly garden. We wanted our daughters to see nature in action each day. Because we live on a busy road, we also wanted the buffer from the cars that speed back and forth during rush hour, a danger that frequently put me on edge.
We wanted this change for ourselves as well. Michelle is a connoisseur of beauty. She has an eye for color and design symmetries that routinely escape me, at least until she guides my eyes to some new delight. For her, the garden would be a natural extension of the million thoughtful choices she has made in our lives.
For me, our front yard had become a small yet steady source of shame; like a project that had been pushed to the corner for far too long. It was the one part of our home where we hadn’t carved any room for joy. Instead, I just kept mowing over the weeds, pushing the blades around a giant shrub in the middle of the yard that offered little more than a dollop privacy.
2020 was a year for pulling home projects out of the corner. For either moving them into the dust bin of history or tackling them head on. It was a year for sorting out our real priorities.
Our vision for the garden became a reality in April, unleashing a new source of quiet magic into our lives. The credit goes to a small landscaping team of recent refugees and a leader from a local faith community; one that is brilliantly creating jobs for refugees that are policed or ignored in so many other corners of Texas.
They worked wonders.
First they built a ranch style fence, which gave a joyful boundary to our home. Then they used stones and rocks to create a simple terrace that re-ordered our entryway. They then uprooted all those weeds I once mowed and spread out a small avalanche of mulch.
With the land ready, Michelle led the collection of native greenery from a handful of nurseries. In addition to plants that can withstand the August summers of Texas, our priority was on flowering plants that pollinators love... Milkweed. Lantana. Bluebonnets.
From there, nature took over. It wasn’t long before we saw at least one butterfly every day. Then two. Then four. And then we lost count. The vision was indeed real.
Our front yard was finally a source of joy. We stopped rushing between the front door and our car in the driveway. We began to linger in the incredible spaces that stand in between. We began to watch.
We witnessed each plant growing on its own, at its own pace, while also encouraging and protecting its neighbors. It was the kind of transformation that made room for a million more.
Rooting in the Storm
Beyond our new fence, the world was becoming more and more precarious.
Society was volatile long before the COVID-19 pandemic. Our climate, politics, and major aspects of our economy were already on thin ice. Global temperatures were already rising. Automation had already displaced jobs by the millions. And democracy itself already looked like an endangered species.
Then came the pandemic. Public gatherings ground to a near halt and daily life slowed down dramatically. Other shifts moved at warp speed. Jobs, homes, and lives were taken. Inequities grew exponentially. Media grew even more fragmented. Everything that could pivoted to virtual. Massive changes were both accelerating and slowing down. The world was spinning faster and more slowly.
With this chaotic pacing, the fractures in our shared reality only deepened.
Perhaps more than ever, your position in life shaped how you were experiencing reality. Evictions skyrocketed, but so did home sales. Unemployment hit historic highs, as did the stock market. Millions were thrust into the valleys of desperation. Yet millions of us also spent the year improving our yards and home work spaces, fortifying personal pockets of hope.
Like many of you, Michelle and I both dedicated our work to helping our city to build back better.
Early in the Spring, the non-profit I lead organized a citywide commitment to Equitable Recovery, starting with a pledge from K-12, higher education, youth development, business and government leaders. These leaders made a shared vow to help each and every young person in our community bounce back from the many harms of the pandemic. Since the Spring, they’ve distributed millions of meals, launched bold new outreach strategies, started closing the digital divide, and have prioritized those students most at risk of falling behind. And they’ve done all of this while pivoting to virtual instruction and programming to minimize the spread of the virus.
They advanced a shared solution, one where each of us has a clear contribution to the whole.
There’s no single leader, community, institution, business or government that can ensure justice takes root. Even our strongest movements must be linked in ways that fuel a larger web of response; translating the sunlight of vision and the water of relationships into shared realities. This is the lifelong work of millions. And our reliance on one another was made even more urgent in 2020.
Quiet Magic
A garden cannot save the world. No matter how beautiful its views or how many pollinators bless its paths, it is just a small patch of earth. Even if every front yard on earth was turned into a garden, inequity and volatility would still grow their reach. Our fences would still exclude those with the deepest needs.
But gardens do point to the larger ecosystem solutions our world desperately needs.
In my family life, our garden fuels our joy. It gives us a place to go when the day has eaten away at our sanity, when technology is threatening to take permanent control of our brains, or when the events of the world start to overwhelm us, yet again. It is our most proximate respite; where the healing power of the breeze can make its mark. And it is a destination point for neighbors, where we find a place to sit down together even as the winds of change pick up speed.
Our garden reminds me of the quiet magic that runs our world; the magic of process.
Recently we witnessed something we had only read about in a particular children’s book... we saw a caterpillar become a butterfly, slowly and steadily transforming over the course of weeks. First Michelle spotted the green cocoon hanging from our front porch. Then came the regular calls from our oldest daughter to look and see how the cocoon was faring. Then one day, after arriving back home, they both saw that the cocoon had turned purple. And when you peered inside you could make out the wings that had formed.
When we walked out of our front door a few hours later, there was a full grown butterfly waiting for us, hanging right next to the now empty cocoon shell. It’s the kind of event you only see when you really slow down and, even then, only when you’re lucky.
Finding Our Wings
The demands of 2020 tested the sanity of leaders everywhere. Our social worlds shrunk while our emotional landscapes burst wide open. But we were reminded, time and again, of the simple stabilizing power of stepping outside and embracing the sunlight.
Like many of you, I rethought my approach to the world at large; not just how to stay six feet away, but how to also move closer to the pain of others, to keep my distance and grow my solidarity at the same time.
When looking at the changes that reshaped our politics and broader environment, I can’t help but wonder: Was 2020 a cocoon year for leaders across our world? Did the inner gardener in each of us further awaken? Were new ecosystems born that will help us to heal our communities and grow stronger than ever before?
Caterpillars crawl. Butterflies fly. They are the same organism but radically different beings. Somehow the one has figured out how to become the other. Caterpillars have learned how to leverage their crawling into transformation.
From the start of their lives, they inch their way forward. Their 16 legs pull them across the dirt floor, over the ground they once thought was their ceiling. All the while, their core gets stronger. They learn how to carry their weight.
Like other crawlers, they build up their center of power and movement through their close connection to the earth. Unlike other crawlers, they are not bound by that form of strength. They perform one final climb, up to the place where they will become reborn. Within that outer shell, they trade in their grounded musculature for wings.
And then they fly. Moving at a pace that was previously unimaginable. Seeing their world from an entirely new perspective. Expanding their range and their experience of what’s possible. Bringing beauty and joy to us all.
