Views
Tending Our Gardens
Biodiversity and the GLTBQ Community
Tending Our Gardens
 |
A metaphor is a way of using words to help us understand one thing better by comparing it to another thing we already understand – at least somewhat. I keep trying to make the garden metaphor fit our community, but I admit, there are limits to how far the comparison can be pushed.
Maybe some things are similar. If we understand a garden as a community of plants, then yes, we might be a garden. Gardens need tending to thrive, and so does our community. One part of “tending” involves building up the soil by adding compost and aged manure – but not too much all at once, and it needs to have mellowed a bit. In our community, maybe the experiences and knowledge of those who’ve lived through the Stonewall and civil rights era are the nourishing compost that helps tender young shoots grow tall and strong. Maybe some of us have experiences that are more like manure, shitty, messy, sloppy, but somehow important to add to the mix when it’s aged enough to lose the burning pungency that can damage new growth.
But then what do we do with the weeds? Well, I don’t know about you, but my garden always has plenty of weeds. I heard from a terminally cheerful new-age gardener once that “weeds are just flowers we haven’t figured out the right use for yet.” Maybe. The biodiversity folks would say that weeds and wild varieties are really important to survival. They preserve the genes that we might need someday when pests or diseases wipe out the domesticated varieties. And yeah, in a don’t-push-it-too-far way, our community has its weeds, its obnoxious wild ones. And yeah, our community needs them for our survival. They lend us strength, they drive us to do more, they remind us that it hasn’t been very long since all of us were out there in the woods, being tromped on by society, and that some of us are still out there.
Tending our gardens to me means supporting each other, being in each other’s lives, and not looking away when someone is being hurt, regardless of whether the person doing the hurting is some homophobic straight person or some emotionally damaged member of our own community. Throughout the AIDS/HIV crisis, the civil unions struggle, and the establishment of Safe Space for victims of same-gender relationship violence, a lot of us have tended a lot of gardens.
Tending our gardens means sharing when we have extra, whether it’s extra time, extra energy, or extra money to plow back into the community that however well or poorly has tried to support us, to make our lives better. Gardening is at least three-quarters grunt labor – building beds, raking soil, watering, shoveling manure and compost. So is community building. Community building means being on boards of directors, going to meetings, taking leadership roles in organizations that serve our community, taking responsibility for the directions and actions of our institutions. Those organizations and institutions can only grow when they are open to (“absorb”) the information and suggestions (“water and compost”) provided from outside their organizational sphere.
Gardens grow, our community grows. We grow our community by communicating, by finding out what we’re about, what matters to us and why. We nourish our community by caring, by sharing our experiences and our strengths, by not letting the world trample or poison the habitats of our wild cousins. We tend our gardens when we make allies wherever possible among coworkers and neighbors. We need to tend our gardens and grow our community organizations to survive and enrich our lives.
Euan Bear,
Editor