Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside – Finding Home in an English Garden

The atoms that form me coming from the air I breathe, the food I eat; the longer I live here and eat the stuff of the garden, and breathe the air of the valley, the more this place forms the very stuff of myself. The longer I walk among the space and shed the dust of my self onto the ground around me, the more the place becomes the stuff of me. I w

thinking about planting perennial edibles feels like a permanent move towards growing a nourishing home.

delicate erigeron; tall, waving miscanthus; architectural statice; feathery cosmos; all punctuated by the floating heads of button-like scabious.

I threw off my attachment to old beliefs and opened my mind to imaginative possibilities.

The same protective layer necessary to ward off hurt now impeding my ability to accept help, to access connection.

I have had enough fire; it has driven me for so long. What I have needed is a wellspring, a source of a cool perpetual flow of life-giving substance, like this stream. To

When I take my limited body and offer some of my life to the garden, the garden reciprocates with life of its own. When I offer my love to the garden, the garden loves me back.

Every dark dissociation, every shut off and unexamined repression, numbs not only our pain but also our capacity to feel joy. Our ability to love, to transcend, to feel bliss and awe, to imagine the beautiful new worlds that will free us. Part-numbed, wholly weakened, in our desperate attempts to avoid the pain we fear that we cannot bear, we lock

perennial kale that seems really quite attractive, near-neon tubers of oca, and amusing but hopefully useful walking onion.