What does my garden want to be?

'To make a prairie' by Emily Dickinson

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

My mind turns often these days to identity. It is both searingly difficult and insistently important to form one's own identity in a way that is truthful. But identity isn't only personal, it's social. The shifting landscape of social norms churns my constantly evolving sense of self. Ecology is not a bad analogy for this process. My identity, like the landscape around me, is constantly growing, dying, pruning, and evolving. Outside pressure can direct that growth, stunt it, or even make certain forms of it illegal.

Wildness is the uncivil. Irrepressible trans identity colliding with an unfeeling set of two checkboxes. Mangy squirrels digging up the petunias to plant stained black walnuts. Authoritarianism bears down on each, making the expression of these inner truths courageous. We reach toward a goal of perfect identity, something which will make our inner landscape easy and complete. But is it possible to figure out who I really am without outside interference? Or are my antagonists and collaborators an inextricable part of the identity I seek? I know that I can't be, without those around me. But does that include those who hate me?

If I struggle with the question of who I want to be, does my garden? Can my tending aid in its self determination, or only thwart it? Do the laws that surround it represent a foreign adversary or an enfolded part of its wholeness? Is the deer that eats the saplings an antagonist? Is the coal plant, or the government that supports it?

I was taught that ecosystems follow along a narrative arc. From the opening act, whether bulldozer or fire, pioneer species sprout to stabilize the soil. The final form is usually a mature forest. Newer theories of rewilding propose that extinct megafauna where actually responsible for a different kind of endpoint - mammoth grasslands and steppes where dire wolves roamed. Which ecosystem is the true identity of the land? Was my garden a forest born in the wrong body, or a grassland transformed by electric mower rather than wooly rhinoceros?

Rewilding and conservation both use ecological baselines as a goal for return. We try to reach back for a true identity in our fossil record like looking into the eyes of our baby pictures for a hidden answer. I don't think there is any easy truth to this identity. In both cases, experimentation, conversation, and constant recalibration are needed to maintain the delicate homeostasis of truth.

So what does my garden want to be? I think the answer is that there are many desires in my garden: the grass wants to grow tall and flower, the beetles want to bury their grubs deep in the soil, the rain wants to fall and percolate through the humus. Some desires conflict: the deer wants to eat the grass flowers and seeds, the birds want to eat the grubs, the plastic bag wants to collect and hold the rainwater.

As always, I remain in a conversation with the landscape. Plunging my hands into cool soil, picking up shards of styrofoam in the park, or writing. I know we hear each other, and I know that we will always change.