A lot of clients hire me because they've moved into a new home, the youngest child has started 1st grade, finally graduated their last child from college, they're about to have their first baby or they're about to have their 1st grandchild, a child is about to be married. Those are the most-common triggers for hiring me, mostly. . Interesting, yes? . Then, there is the group of people who were born with the love of gardening in their soul. Oddly Providence decided not to sprinkle those souls liberally. More odd, many of the souls born with a love of gardening only discover it, for its true 'Being', decades after trodding Earth. . If you've read this far, you are one of us, a Garden Whisperer. . A woman from Canada, Betty, contacted me for Online Garden Design last year. Betty and her husband had just bought the best house on a tiny lot with views of mountains, valleys, & ocean ever conceived. Minuscule lot. . Betty is in the installation phase now. We used Facebook to see/speak to each other, Pinterest boards, plat, texts, emails, phone calls. Had a live Facebook video/voice appointment with her contractor prior to his work commencing, wish he could be cloned dozens of times over he's so good. . Text from Betty yesterday, "I try to explain my garden to friends. They really don't get it. ' Why bother? Your garden looks fine Blah Blah.' Exhausting. Fortunately husband gets that I need this garden, he just walks past it everyday briefcase in hand, golf clubs in his car. We know US". Journaling last weekend included this exact topic, the wild urge to garden told thru the metaphors of the Light of the universe. Again, if you've read this far, what follows is for you too, not just Betty. More than gardening, quotes below cover all noble passions that drive our souls towards activities that feed more than our own needs, but the needs of Earth and other souls treading their journey. Pic, above, here. "Looking so, across the centuries and the millennia, toward the animal men of the past, one can see a faint light, like a patch of sunlight moving over the dark shadows on a forest floor. It sifts and widens, it winks out, it come again but it persists. It is the human spirit, the human soul, however transient, however faulty men may claim it to be. In its coming man had no part. It merely came, that curious light, and man, the animal, sought to be something that no animal had been before. Cruel he might be, vengeful he might be, but there had entered into his nature a curious wistful gentleness and courage It seemed to have little to with survival, for such men died over and over. They did not value life compared to what they saw in themselves --- that strange inner light which has com from no man knows where, and which was not made by us. It has followed us all the way from the age of ice, from the dark borders of the ancient forest into which our footprints vanish...Man may grow until he towers to the skies, but without this light he is nothing, and his place is nothing. Even as we try to deny the light, we know that it has made us, and what we are without it remains meaningless." Loren Eiseley. . Pic, above, here. . "Let it be admitted that the world's problems are many and wearing, and that the whirlpool runs fast. If we are to build a stable cultural structure above that which threatens to engulf us by changing our lives more rapidly than we can adjust our habits, it will only be by flinging over the torrent a structure as taut and flexible as a spider's web, a human society deeply self-conscious and undeceived by the waters that race beneath it, a society more literate, more appreciative of human worth than any society that has previously existed. That is the sole prescription, not for survival --- which is meaningless --- but for a society worthy to survive. It should be, in the end, a society more interested in the cultivation of noble minds than in change. Loren Eiseley. Pic, above, here. . More than a garden, Betty is paying for her garden with money inherited after her mother died. The feeling of honor, being asked to design a garden has never left me, 3 decades on. Adding to it, a mother's inheritance. Whew. Always prayerful about the work I do for others, now, praying the garden I create for Betty allows her mother's love to continue to surround and infuse her. Wanting my role in the garden to diminish quickly, leaving Betty, and her husband, in their new chapter. It's Betty's garden created from her mother's love. Pic, above, here. . "If we are to live and have something to live for, let us remember, all of us, that we are the servants as well as the masters of our fields." Henry Beston. . "Every man for himself" is a doctrine for a feeding frenzy or for a panic in a burning nightclub, appropriate for sharks or hogs or perhaps a cascade of lemmings. A society wishing to endure must speak the language of care-taking, faith-keeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace. That language is another precious resource that cannot be "privatized." Wendell Berry Pic, above, I shot in a client's garden. . "To be sure, Berry's "rugged individualism" is simply a more poetic term for our common complaint of "entitlement" --- an accusation usually aimed at the young, which upon closer inspection reveals itself as a major undercurrent of capitalist society itself. Contemplating how we got there, Berry points to the aberrant evolution of property rights --- something that originated as protection of the private individual and mutated into the destruction of the public good." Maria Popova. . Quotes, above, are in the macro for everyone, we are each given myriad avenues to come upon the light. My tiny wedge is the micro of gardening. Bearing witness, thru the gift of clients hiring me, to changed lives, watching more than a garden take shape, new lives being born, rippling upon others & Earth in stewardship. . "The more we go inward, the more we outwardly connect.", New York Times, about 2 decades ago. Came to a dead stop, reading it the first time. Seemed so selfish. Deeply myopic. . Instead, its depth can never be known. Blessedly it can be lived. . Garden & Be Well, XOT . Why is it a necessity to follow your passion? Earth needs you to. Have learned the 'selfishness' of going inward to outwardly connect, is grace. . Met a woman, Donna, sideways recently thru Beloved, she's been hired to do his books. Love her. More than doing Quick Books, this woman is having a relationship with it. I watch her in her chair, leaning into the computer screen, talking with it, laughing with it, cheering it, and see the same interaction others have in their gardens. She knows she's in stewardship with her client's livelihood and Quick Books is her partner, while working her own livelihood. Joy watching her grace in action.