On Becoming a Gardener
About body, time, and learning to listen
I didn’t set out to become a gardener. I was on a different path, and became one along the way. What follows is not a change of careers so much as a change in attention.
When I was younger, I wanted to write soundtracks. I set out to be a composer. I studied classical music at a university. It was there that I first encountered a problem that would later shape how I understand work of any kind. My arms were in pain. I tried to play through it, but the pain increased. I was at a loss. I could still think of music, but I couldn’t make it.
My arms hurt, but they weren’t what my therapist treated first. Most of the work was on my shoulders, neck, and especially my back. At the time, it felt like a misunderstanding. But this was the moment the pattern became visible. Pain is not stationary. Symptoms are often caused elsewhere. If the back, shoulders, and neck never release tension, the strain of hours of playing pools in the finer muscles of the forearms. Eventually, the body can’t take any more and gives way at its weakest point.
My attention shifted.
Where is the body holding strain?
What is it compensating for, and for how long?
How do its parts relate to one another over time?
What I was told was this: stop everything. Don’t play. And because playing caused pain, I had little choice but to listen.
It takes a lot of piano playing to injure yourself. My pain came from habitual misalignment between my body parts, and from avoiding a return to neutral, repeated over time. Repetition was the amplifier. It had turned habit into chronic pain.
As I searched for a different way of being, I kept asking: when will I be healed? When will I recover? When will I be back to normal?
Then something shifted. The answer was this: when the alternative becomes the norm. When, through repetition, alignment is what gets amplified.
I now work in gardens with my body, for a living, a lot. I tend to it as deliberately as I tend the land, before work and after, preventatively and reactively. It doesn’t always look the same. I add new practices and set old ones aside. And if I’m going the wrong way, I have a reliable barometer. My body tells me quickly when something isn’t working, and I adjust.
Gardens are made with tools and techniques, but the maker, the gardener, is the one doing the work. And that gardener is someone with a body.
You.