Personal Statement

From the time I looked up into the face of an Iris while following my Dad around as he watered the flower beds, being in a garden was a childhood favorite! The urge to do my own gardening came when I moved in with my first boyfriend. I don’t remember how much food this tentative attempt produced. A couple years later I had a brief introduction to bio-dynamic gardening at the Rudolf Steiner Institute, but it wasn’t until I was starting a family in 1981 that gardening fully took hold. We lived in the short growing season of northern New Mexico’s high desert. Our first year in Sunshine valley, we had a frost in July! I used the seeds and followed planting instructions printed in the Johnney’s Seeds catalog from Main to grow many successful gardens. My approach was practical; straight rows of vegetables meant to produce as much food as possible. I learned to plant green beans on June 20th so the first growth would emerge right after the (usual)) last frost. Eighteen years later, a copy of the Perelandra Gardening Workbook showed up in my life. I avoided looking at it, seriously doubting one could form relationship with nature spirits! When I was ready to open it, I had moved to a barren mesa on the edge of Taos. There, I went outside and stated that I would like to garden in partnership with nature and received the vision of a circular garden, with the beds forming a pentagram within it. Under the guidance of the nature spirits, every bed was a combination of vegetables, herbs and flowers. I but down rose quarts in the middle and a foot of copper pipe at each point in the star and the most beautiful garden grew! The first time I went out to do the Perelandra soil balancing process, a shaft through the earth seemed to open, connecting me with the full body of Gaia. The only word I could find to express my experience was communion. I had experienced communion, not in church but with the earth! Then I was ready to read Machaelle Small Wright’s book, Behaving As If the God in All Life Mattered. Machaelle’s gardening experience seemed too good to be true… and definitely too good to replicate, but I had begun my own amazing journey. Recently, after seven years of not having a place to garden, I have come back to gardening with the nature spirits around a new house I purchased outside of Santa Fe. This is my third growing season. The more my garden develops with the life of birds, rabbits, lizards, insects and caterpillars it attracts, the more I love my home! Using Perelandra methods of balancing life in the garden, I do not fence anyone out or find non-poisonous ways to kill… instead I ride the learning curve of discovery to find what is needed when things fall out of vitality. My gardening is a way of living in harmony with the god in all life, providing direct education on the Rights of Nature.