Won't you come to my secret garden?

I feel I have fully arrived at some aspects of adulthood that I was curious I could ever fully show up to. Because of the failure’s of my own father, I have always doubted if I could ever truly be the nurturing, supportive father that I longed to be. Doubtless, I took a queue from my own mother, who provided me a model for how to be a strong, nurturing caretaker. So, here I find myself, in the first day of potty learning with Juniper, after having gone to therapy for four years, stared down my deepest OCD fears, and 2 and half years into co-parenting a toddler, just feeling like I am HIM: I am that dude who has become the person I wanted to be. I just needed to say that out loud, because I always question whether I have done enough to really feel worthy of saying that. Like any person interested in equity, you constantly assess to make sure that you are living up to you own feminist, abolitionist views as a parent. There is believing and doing, and I am interested in the space where we are doing based on what we believe (commonly referred to as praxis). It’s a process, but I can safely say that I am showing up to the nurturing and supporting as the sort of non-gendered parent I had always hoped to be. Yes, Lily and I’s parenting is more alike in our expression than it is different, which is an active attempt to overthrow gender norms. But that’s a topic for another day.

I also have gotten into the garden, as I have discussed in previous essays, at the earliest point in my own recorded history. Like my mom did before me, I have slowly expanded my collaboration with my plant kin to the point now where I feel confident in my ability as a nurturer and supporter of their precious springtime growth. My mugwort is currently five feet tall. My baby yarrow, grown from seed last year, is now all grown up and taking up space in its own sunny spot. The Calendula have heeded their call to growth and have poked their heads above soil, waiting their turn to dazzle buzzing pollinators with their vibrant orange, yellow, and white blooms. Myrtle, the silver maple, has extended her lush canopy once again, and we sat in her shade this morning as a family while juniper played in between potty learning. We are all in bloom.

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This learning to prioritize my plant kin’s life and to participate actively in their flourish was a learned skill that grew along with my growth as a parent. It’s still surprising to me this morning that I have been able to put everything back together from my OCD and the loss of my mom to be this person that can be depended on. Adulthood, it’s this slow, blooming surprise, that unfurls one day for you to notice that you are living up to the responsibility of being someone who your kin can depend on. It makes my heart sing to write that. It’s all these small actions that are my love note to the world: holding juniper’s hand while she leads me to go play a game she came up with, hand watering my plant kin in the early evening, clearing out their little homes and mulching them to ensure they can thrive. That is what it means to live up to the weighty responsibility of love.

Honestly, I think I needed to write this to convince myself that I was still a force of love in the world, which as I am writing this feel so silly to have to say. I have been on my fiery Aries (Aries rising here) path for some time now, setting boundaries and speaking sharp truths. Many of you don’t know me as the gentler version of myself that was only interested in how things were interconnected. The resonance I felt with the love and interbeing present in so much of the Order of Interbeing sect of Buddhism was one of the key reasons I held on to that Buddhist path for so long. I have changed much since identifying solely as that person, embracing the multitudes of being a carbon-based lifeform with a skin suit and ACESSORIES! (haha) Yet, if we are still speaking candidly, all my boundaries and sharp truths come from others failing in meeting the weighty responsibility of love in their lives and the earnest desire to ensure that I do meet those lofty aspirations. Henceforth, I cast out the undeserving to the four corners to make more room for me to get back to the work of be that simple, gentle-hearted soul that I am. Indeed, I have always defined myself by what I could offer others through my generosity and my ability to be a teacher and caretaker and sometimes you need a little fire and brimstone to get there.

I found confirmation of this recently in reading Rebecca Scolnick’s The Witch’s Book of Numbers: Enhance Your Magic with Numerology. Scolnick explained the concept of one’s life path number, which is:

My life path number is a 6, which Scolnick described as the path of “the nurturer,” who are “natural caretakers,…who model for us how to show up for ourselves and others. They remind us to send time with our feet in the dirt an dour eyes to the sky. They parent us and help us to reparent ourselves.”2 These folks are the green witches, midwives, and doulas of the worlds that we are trying to bring into being, who “create spaces where all are safe to express, feel, and experience community care.”3 These nurturers aren’t the first expression of caretaking I exhibited as a lost teenager being asked to be the man of the house: a confused jumble of hypermasculine protective traits. No, these nurturers are those who have learned to set the appropriate boundaries so that they can care for themselves as much as they care for others, because they are on that never-ending healing journey to grow themselves just as much as they help others grow.

You could imagine my surprise when I read this passage this week. After picking up this book from the library and plopping down on the couch to read next to Juniper, the Aries rising part me wanted to scoff. I have been sitting with that scoff all week. That scoff represents that moment of identity friction where one part of who you are confronts that profound weirdness of another part of your identity. “Fiery, boundary-setting jim, meet gentle, garden-father jim,” I say to myself now, ritualizing the encounter. “Fiery Jim, thank you for doing the work to build the appropriate boundaries so that we can have the space to safely heal,” I say to myself. “Gentle Jim, you can come back out now. Fiery Jim has built a safe space for us to be that nurturing person for our kin,” I whisper softly. And so the integration of two epochs of Jim meet and see each other as interwoven parts of a whole.

With the integration complete, I now feel more clear and safe about inhabiting a world that entails the continual wounding that accompanies living in a white supremecist, patriarchal, homophobic society hell bent on plunging head first into climate collapse. Yet, what the life path number has taught me is that I want my nurturing caretaker side to be like a secret garden, hidden behind a cascading hedgerow of ivy, that is for my identified kin alone. Its within that safe space, created by my fiery side, that “gentle Jim” can be free and safe to be the supportive, nurturing being that he was destined to walk as in this plane. Won’t you come now to my secret garden, dear reader?

All my best to you and your own kin,

James