Out on my walk yesterday evening, I passed the Community Garden on the far side of my village, which, in a few months time, will have apple trees in full bloom!
I laughed as I reached the site as, in all the time I’ve wandered over there, I have never once seen anyone in it. It’s an irony of language that what we call a community garden is rarely occupied.
You see, despite all the talk of no borders and any kind of boundary being a bad thing, we don’t actually practice that.
We like personal spaces. We like having control of our surroundings, we want to keep ourselves to ourselves. When people say they want to open things up to people, it’s on the proviso that they have the run of it and dictate what happens there or they don’t want to part of it themselves and order other people around.
You can observe it in their behaviour. What they do.
I also remarked on a recent Twitter post where someone had posted a video of them smelling some blossoms in an act of apparent meditation. My response:
“I pass a wonderful blossom almost every single day and smell on my way and on the way back.
But I don’t record it to use it as a virtue signal nor to prove a point. It is a private moment, a pause, of my connection with the divine. Nothing more, nothing less.”
We’re turning everything into a performance rather than a practice. Parents constantly pose with their children on social media to display how virtuous they are. It’s so tacky and ubiquitous.
Tend thy own garden, build the walls high when necessary and admit only the respectful and dignified.