Emotional Gardening

I’ve spent more time than a person should considering the relationship between Love and Hate, and I no longer believe in the concept of transmutation - that one is able to turn Hate into Love. Instead, like many before me, I believe we are born into natural Truth and must choose Love over Hate.

Now, maybe this reads like some kind of pseudo-philosophical hippie bullshit, so let me elucidate by way of a metaphor that predates us all by many thousands of years: a garden.¹

Two points about gardens before we get into the metaphor as it relates to Love and Hate. First, gardens are not natural - they are manmade. So we are not born into a garden, which is to say that we must attend to the world we inherit when we are born in order to make it what we desire. Second, a garden left untended will not thrive, it will devolve back into the natural entropic chaos of evolutionary forces. Darwinian survival of the fittest: the strongest plants will survive, as will the strongest weeds, pests, and the like.

At this point, you can likely see where this is going: if a garden is a metaphor for the world we want to live in, then we must tend to it, and that means nurturing the good things - like flowers, fruits, vegetables, trees, streams, insects, and all of the other ecosystem inhabitants that support our little patch of heaven. And on the flip side, we must strive to reduce and limit the bad things that hurt the garden ecosystem.

Now, thus far, this is an obvious metaphor. Love is the good stuff we want to grow, Hate is the bad stuff we need to root out. But the real wisdom is in discerning good from bad, and the relationship between them.

As humans, we are constantly amazed by our ability to glimpse more deeply into nature’s Truth and utilize our newfound understanding to improve our gardening. This process is called Science. But too often we mistake our understanding for Truth itself, and therein lies our folly.

And this is where the notion of emotional gardening comes into play. Because we can never fully know nature’s Truth, we must enjoy the rewards of our intellect with a sense of humility. How confident are we really that we correctly understood nature’s Truth and utilized it to improve our garden? A wise man will feel deeply uneasy about his understanding, no matter how smart he is, and thus will move gently and carefully through his garden.

Yet today, when we look in the mirror, what sort of gardeners do we see? Too many of us tend to our garden with such pious zealotry that we know the Truth, and this overconfidence leads to conflict amongst us gardeners, which is why a gardener must learn to tend to her inner garden before she is able to contribute to the communal one.

Each of us is the keeper of our inner world, which is imbued with the very same natural Truth of the external world we are born into. We must attend to our inner world in order to both create and maintain a thriving, abundant garden. In a Sysiphian fashion, over and over we must root out the negative, overly critical, overly confident, often hateful thoughts and emotions of our human experience in order to make room for loving, humble, empathetic ones.

Too often, we ignore our inner gardening and instead focus on communal ones unaware that the weeds, pests, and locusts of our inner gardens leak into our shared ones. The Hate we all to foster within our inner garden becomes our shared experience.

Thus, unlike transmutation, which turns Hate into Love, instead we must weed out Hate, starting with ourselves first, and then our families, and then our communities, and then our countries, and finally our shared globalized world, in order to provide Love room to grow. If we each start within our smallest locus of control and gradually build outward as our gardening skills improve, we may just be able to - as a community of gardeners - create the world we want to live in.

So do your emotional gardening y’all.

Footnotes

1. Who can name a really really famous pseudo-philosophical Garden?? Raise your hand. ↩