Love in the garden

The caring gardener: love and service at the centre

The beginnings of this essay has been sitting in my notes for some weeks. I had hoped to get it out in early February. But the start to this new Year of the Snake has been somewhat wobbly and I’ve been riding a wave of dealing with minor but time- and energy-consuming personal circumstances as they’ve arrived with little time or headspace for sitting down to give this piece the necessary attention. There’s been something of an air of “what the heck is going to happen next?”, reflected more broadly too in the wider world and the alarming state of politics all around. But we are in transformative times and transformation rarely happens without some discomfort. Shedding old skin for renewal and regeneration is likely to cause some upheaval and inconvenience, so I suppose the disruption only seems fitting for this specific time. It has also been good practice - not falling prey to chaos and urgency when external factors have felt out of control, but to remember nourishment first, to keep sight of what’s important and return to vision and clarity. And so I return here to love and care, even if it’s a month later than I had hoped. I can think of little more important or urgent right now than love and care in the face of too many bad actors trying to send us all in the opposite direction.

(Acknowledging here that this is a big topic. There are whole books, plays, courses etc etc written on the subject of love and many of them. This is barely a scratching of the surface, but I hope it provides a useful jumping off point for discussion and deeper dives. I sincerely hope that I have managed to coax something vaguely coherent from the many jumbled thoughts swirling round my head at the moment. And if not, I can only apologise if this piece appears a bit rambling.)

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The caring gardener: love and service at the centre, by Sui Searle

I finished reading Prentis Hemphill’s book, What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, at the start of this year. It was a comfort and a guide. An affirming, fortifying, clarifying and instructive read that consolidated much of what I have been thinking about and themes that have loomed large for me over the past several years. The book culminated in a chapter called Love at the Center and it got me thinking again about love, and care, and what they actually mean.

What does it mean for us to care and to put love at the centre?

We have a tendency to use terms such as love and care quite casually. Often with little definition, elaboration or explanation. If we really mean the love we profess, how does that translate in how we approach our relationships? What might that mean for how we garden? For how we treat ourselves, each other and our more-than-human kin?

What is love?

In All About Love, bell hooks’ seminal book from 2000, she writes, “awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination. […] A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.”

Hemphill has echoes of this in their book, when they say that, “love is when we will another’s existence.”

This also got me revisiting the Ecology of Love course taught by Andreas Weber on Advaya a couple of years ago.

There he spoke of love as being about nourishing life. The prevailing picture in our culture is that love is about obtaining something that we lack. We are focussed on love as something that we need. I think this is sometimes reflected when we claim to “love nature” or “love gardening”. There can often be an underlying element of need there. What can nature give me? What can a garden give me? Calm, solace, sanctuary, headspace, belonging… This ties into the dominant view of “nature” as a thing, an object to possess. As Weber says - this is love as a signal that we need something and is connected to a very materialistic way of thinking - the idea that a person or thing will provide us with something that we don’t have.

He argues that instead, love is about asking: what can I give back to life? How can I make life more alive? How can I make life grow? It is to do with surrender and not with protection. Our cultural story does not acknowledge that everything living and breathing is yearning to participate in aliveness and desires to nourish this aliveness. Our story is about finding the objects that we lack, without which we believe we are not safe, or that we are not good.

He concedes that it’s difficult for us, in our culture, to reconceive relationships as a common endeavour - a mutual compact - to nourish life. He proposes that the first thing that needs to go is the feeling that it’s about us. In fact, love is about aliveness and about giving life. (This is not to mean as opposed to death - death is a part of reality and love is about meeting life on its own terms and accepting reality. Death is a part of aliveness and re-enlivening, transformation and metamorphosis and the generation of life.)

In Erich Fromm’s much referenced book, The Art of Loving, Fromm says: “There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognised. Or as Weber puts it: “to love is to be interested in the aliveness of the other” - something Weber marvels at as being both simple and incredible since the emphasis is placed on the process of relating. In this way, love is not a feeling but an activity - something you do (as it is for kinning).

Love is something you do that nourishes life.

What is care?

In The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence from Verso Books, written in 2020 by The Care Collective, care is defined as not only “‘hands-on’ care, or the work people do when directly looking after physical and emotional needs of others… ‘Care’ is also a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life. Above all, to put care centre stage means recognising and embracing our interdependencies.”

The manifesto adds that: “Care is our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive - along with the planet itself. […] our capacities to care are interdependent and cannot be realised in an uncaring world. Practices more conventionally understood as care…cannot be properly carried out unless both caregivers and care receivers - indeed, all of us - are supported. This can only happen if care, as a capacity and a practice, is cultivated, shared and resourced on an egalitarian basis.”

They champion an ethics of promiscuous care and call for creating a more capacious notion of care - one that proliferates outwards, where we care more and in ways that are experimental and extensive.

The collective addresses the matter of kinship: “Only by multiplying our circles of care - in the first instance, by expanding our notion of kinship - will we achieve the psychic infrastructures necessary to build a caring society that has universal care as its ideal.” They call for changing our hierarchies of care in the direction of radical egalitarianism: “All forms of care between all categories of human and non-human should be valued, recognised and resourced equally, according to their needs or ongoing sustainability. This is what we call an ethics of promiscuous care.”

To me, this tracks closely with love. But what is the difference? I mentioned in my previous essay how Judy Ling Wong encourages enjoyment and love of our environment, because if we love something we want to care for it. We can care for someone and not necessarily love them, but if we love we will necessarily care. Placing love at the centre means that care will naturally follow. Fromm writes, “Beyond the element of giving, the active character of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.”

Love implies care.

“Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love,” Fromm adds.

Care is an ingredient, a foundation, of love. Love is not evidenced if there is no care.

Love in the garden

In another of bell hook’s work, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, she talks about how many professors view classrooms as a “mini-country governed by their autocratic rule.” The classroom becomes a “microcosm of dominator culture”. This seems very familiar when I think about how, when we do not act with love or care, our gardens so easily become this too.

In All About Love, hooks points to our culture of materialism as creating a world of narcissism in which the focus of life is solely on acquisition and consumption. A culture of narcissism is not a place where love can flourish, she say. Instead, greed and exploitation become the norm when an ethic of domination prevails. And so we can see this in gardening too, as well as elsewhere in our lives. “Intense spiritual and emotional lack in our lives is the perfect breeding ground for material greed and overconsumption. In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.”

Often it is fear too that drives us towards this domination.

As Hemphill writes, “…we seek the safe distance of hierarchies to protect us from the work of love. Our culture substitutes domination for the love that could exist between us. We seek power over one another and our environment in a way that perverts love into possession.”

And hooks: “…fear keeps us from trusting in love. […] When we choose to love we choose to move against fear - against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect - to find ourselves in the other.”

Opening ourselves up to love - up to aliveness! - can be hard - it makes us vulnerable to loss, pain and grief, as much as wonder, joy and pleasure.

Love and liberation, if that is what we seek and hope to practice moving towards in our gardens, has to mean freedom from abuse and domination.

This calls for a conscious love ethic or practice. If we are attempting to create the conditions for freedom in our gardening, then we are called to resist reinforcing and recreating hierarchies and enacting abuse and neglect. Instead, we are called to take interest in the aliveness of the other. We are asked to care about rights, respect and justice.

Similar to what was discussed in the last newsletter, Weber calls for doing away with the term “nature”. Instead he calls on us to understand that which we call nature as embodiments of love. To see all the beings involved as persons, as subjects with desires.

One of the things I understand from hooks’ work is that committed acts of caring seeks to create the conditions for freedom. In the way that she suggests a teacher can ask of students, “What do you need in order to learn?” or “how can I serve?”, perhaps these too are questions that the gardener can ask of the garden and our kin who live there: “What do you need in order to thrive?” and “how can I serve?”.

Isn’t gardening, at its best, a manifestation of this in a way? What is fruitful, regenerative gardening if not willing another being (plants, wildlife, the garden, the wider ecosystem, the larger whole…) to live and thrive?

Being of service

So perhaps then, gardening as a love ethic or practice means asking not what the beings in our gardens and ecosystems can give us, but how we might serve them. If, as Andreas Weber puts it, love is about the aliveness of the other, then it is not all about us. The primary thing is not our ego, it is life and being in service of life. Weber points out that this is what life itself does - it is what ecosystems do. Abundance is created by individuals giving themselves away to others by being edible. This creates abundance and grants abundance to individuals who give themselves away. He argues that, in this way, ecosystems are love processes - an embodied eroticism.

There have been times, when I have broached, in conversation, this idea of love and service and of relinquishing the ego, that I feel people becoming concerned. Partly because we are so conditioned in our society to elevate the individual and put the self first but also because there are genuine concerns of being vulnerable to abuse when we are being asked to be in service of love. But as Weber makes clear, it is not about saying we need to be codependent or that we should satisfy the needs of others without care for our own needs. This, he says, is an inverted way of understanding love as possession, as satisfying the need for things. Life is not about us. Not from the perspective of ego. It is about serving the aliveness of the world. He doesn’t see a discontinuity between the ecological whole serving itself and generating life, and human culture. Human relationships should also be a part of serving the whole.

Love as a practice

Prentis Hemphill:

“…the love that it takes to heal, is a verb to be practiced out loud. It is the love found in listening. The love of hard truths. It is the love of showing up for one another when it is risky. It is the love of this inescapable web that compels us to care for the land and its sacred sites. It is a love that compels us to remember and relearn what has been lost. It’s a love that lets us arrive, present to this time. A love that like the light from the sun provokes a flower into its full bloom. Love can do things no other force can. It is only through love that we are ever really changed.”

bell hooks:

“Love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or of loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualize love. This is why it is useful to see love as a practice. […] We learn to communicate, to be still and listen to the needs of our hearts, and we learn to listen to others. We learn compassion by being willing to hear the pain, as well as the joy, of those we love.”

We are part of the whole

Not long ago I saw a meme that said it was “time to heal our relationship with Mother Earth”. It felt true. It felt much needed. And I wondered what this meant, practically?

Perhaps understanding what it means to love and then to put love and service at the centre (to have love as an organising principle rather than capital, profit, growth, self-aggrandisement/self-promotion, individualism, hoarding of wealth, domination…) might go some way to helping answer this. Wouldn’t doing this help bring healing to so many of our personal and wider relationships and the ways in which we relate to all beings? As Weber notes, to be nourishing towards life in our relationships helps relating and it helps ecology both. It is beneficial and enriching on all levels.