Remember back in high school English class when you learned the fundamental themes that lay behind all great literature or an idea like that? One of the themes was man vs. nature, right? And maybe you read Moby Dick or The Old Man and the Sea or To Build a Fire – one of those great adventure stories of a man going up against the forces of nature. And there was some agreement that this represented the way things are: we are in an inevitable conflict with nature, ‘red in tooth and claw.’ Eat or be eaten.

I used to team-teach with a biologist. He would teach environmental science and I taught an English course on literature about nature. When we were just starting, I looked at writers like Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Ed Abbey, but I also began exploring writers from other cultures, mostly American Indian. I got very excited at what I was reading in these novels. They saw humans as on a continuum with the rest of nature, not separate from, in conflict with, or above nature, but part of the whole living world. I also found in these stories a level of comfort with psychological phenomena like dreams and fantasies. It seemed that the closer people were to nature, the more they were open to information that came to them from other than rational sources.

Gradually, I came to see that our assumptions about the way things are did not have to be the whole story. What I came to is this: our ideas about nature often mirror our attitudes toward the animal part of human life – the instincts and the body, as well as the unconscious. In our culture, we have a dualistic way of thinking about the world. We divide terms into opposites, like man/nature; good/evil; light/darkness; reason/instinct; conscious/unconscious, and we think the first term is better than the second. Because of this, we see nature as a resource, something to be exploited for our own use, and we even include our own bodies in this thinking. Have you watched Extreme Makeover? How about it? People now think they not only have to diet and tweeze and girdle; they have to nip and tuck, cut and paste, so the human body becomes just another resource. But I think it goes further than that. We do the same thing to our minds, People teach children not to daydream, we multitask so we don’t waste any time, we work longer and longer with less leisure, and we have an epidemic of addictions, depression, learning disorders, eating disorders, and generally what Thoreau called ‘lives of quiet desperation.’ We need to get back to nature. And I think that getting back to nature is a way of getting back to what’s authentic in ourselves – a way of reconnecting with our own psychological potentials, our own natural rhythms, and our sense of being allied with other humans and with the rest of nature. That feeling of affiliation is what E. O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, calls 'Biophilia.'

Think about what you love about gardening – the easy rhythms of the season, the physical pleasures of digging in warm soil, the joy of watching a plant emerge, bud, bloom, and set seed, the surprises, the escape from the constant barrage of information, the time to dream and fantasize, the stillness, the feelings of connection to the creatures, the humbling feelings of knowing nature, and not you, is in control. To me, gardening is as much about cultivating soul as it is about cultivating land. And I know I’m no more important to the process than the tiny soil organisms or the squirrels I can’t control or the insects that enjoy my plants’ leaves. All this helps me feel like I’m not apart from nature but part of it, part of the great sweep of time, the cycling of matter, the tides and swells, and that it’s just plain ok to have a body that’s aging, to be an animal among animals, an organism among organisms. I even have this great mental picture of some time-lapse film of sunshine being converted to green leaves being eaten by someone who maybe pollinates a blossom that ends up in my salad and then produces the energy that gets me back out into the garden. I love the idea that my lunchtime meal is really sunshine. Sometimes I even sing to my tomatoes: ‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.’ Of course it’s not true: the tomatoes aren’t my only sunshine. Thankfully.

So to me gardening is a lot more than just a hobby. It’s a way of being human. And because I know how dependent I am, my garden is, on all the rest of the life around us, I think I’m more conscious of my potential to do harm, and more careful. Not perfect, not even very good, but more careful.