The Sanctuary of Distinguished Guests

The world is a mess and will only get worse. But that world? It isn't our world.

(Also published at A Beautiful Resistance)

The world is a complete mess and only getting worse, but I’m smiling because of a frog.

Last year, spurred on by my husband’s burnout from a high-stress professional job, we began to change the small bit of land around our house. How it happened was that, as part of his recovery from the subsequent cortisol crash my husband wandered zombie-like into the small street-facing frontage with a small packet of seeds and a shovel. And then he kept going with more seeds, and a bigger shovel, and a month later he’d turn a small into a fairy-tale cottage garden.

And then he kept going, and going, and going.

My husband had “gardened” before, but not like this. Before, everything was well-trimmed and planned out, the kind of gardening more accurately described as landscaping. But as I watched from the windows during small breaks from work, I witnessed an urgent passion and a passionate urgency begin to transform every bit of formal and ordered space around our house into entire worlds.

To be clear, I helped, but this was really all him. I’d always gardened too, cultivating and caring for vegetables, a few favorite flowers, and lots of medicinal plants. If anything, I was more the gardener than he was, at least until his burnout. But watching him I realised something was occurring that I’d never be able to match.

First, the neat and tidy ornamental hedges disappeared beneath chaotic floods of wildflowers; then, the broad paths of white gravel thinned as amaranths, lupines, and phacelia swept over them.

And that was just the small front area. Before I’d even noticed, an entire parking space no one ever used had completely disappeared beneath mounds of remediated soil hosting salvaged plants and more flowers. Then, the other side of our house became a long and wild row of salvaged ferns interspersed with vines crawling up a trellised line of fruiting trees and bushes.

In just a few short months, the small area contained by beech hedges began to look much more like a monastery garden than a “yard,” and he wasn’t done. He and a friend built wooden stairs from our backyard up to our balcony, connecting the inside and outside of our house in a way that changed how we moved about in the world and eliminated all sense of where “nature” ends and the “human” begins.

That was all last year, and he wasn’t done. This year, all but a small strip of lawn was uprooted to make way for more wildlife. New plots for vegetables and flowers were hewn from clay soil compacted by decades of monoculture, and more remediated soil was mounded up to make homes for trees rarely seen after capitalism’s centuries-long war against difference and variation. On the lee side of a small pond, a shade garden hosting mosses and ferns arose under the thick branches of a hazel tree; raspberries stand guard atop a tower built from salvaged wood from which strawberries cascade and upon which grape climbs.

With such creative competition, my own gardening couldn’t help but get a little better, too. Many of the plants he’s put into the ground are ones I started for him, though my attention has been taken up particularly with cultivating as many practical plants as possible. Most of what I grow can be eaten, or made into teas, or used as salves, or smoked, or turned into perfumes, an embarrassing but nevertheless crucial utilitarian ethic as the world becomes more unstable. He, though, focuses more on what is beautiful for-itself and creating more and more space for the beautiful to be itself.

And that’s why I’m smiling about this frog as the world around us seems to fall apart.

Creating so much space for beauty and for life does something else as well. It attracts more beauty and more life, an unlooked-for effect we first began to notice last autumn. There were many more insects, suddenly, especially butterflies. Then, the birds came as they always do, attracted by my mother-in-law’s many bird feeders. But there were scores more of them than before, and new ones, and they were louder and more vibrant than had been seen for a very long time.

Others came too. I watched bemused as several moles made their slow way through my fallowed vegetable plot, feasting on the grubs of an invasive beetle I’d had no other luck in managing. Herons hunted the mice our sadly departed cat once chased, staring down at us regally from their perch upon our roof. Foxes barked their laughter just outside our hedge as winter thawed, and then the first distinguished guest arrived.

It was my mother-in-law who first noticed its appearance, clued in through the disappearance of something else. Trudging across the cold and wet mulch path in early spring rains, she found one of her bird feeders missing, and then another, stolen by a guest we later caught on a wildlife camera. Venturing much farther from the forests than usual, a pine martin had dug a burrow just by our pond to be as close as possible to the seeds we didn’t realize we were feeding it.

Then came the raven couple, who each morning before sunrise knock on every window of our house with their beaks to make sure we know they’re awake. We took to their point quickly, and now make sure they have their own stash of food — unsalted peanuts still in their shells — which the other birds do not touch. And they’ve dutifully taught their well-fed fledgling this one neat trick to make sure the humans in this house never run out of food for them.

Now a hare has built its warren just outside our hedgerow, commuting from it across the cow pasture twice daily. Occasionally, it hops up to the cows as if to greet them, and I watch bemused as their startlement often makes them flee its approach as it were a wolf.

But it’s the frog that’s really gotten me. A few weeks ago, sitting by a recently daylighted stream, I watched hundreds of tadpoles dance in the warm shallows. And I wondered — might this year be the year we, too, had frogs? Would they deign to visit the places we’d created, and would they find them suitable enough to stay?

And then a few nights we heard it. Oh, he’s loud, and happy. And so is she, because there now seems to be a mated pair of them, and when their croaks begin each night the joy I feel is also just like relief.

The world — or worlds, really — within our hedgerowed border is certainly small, but it’s more than enough for them. And it’s also enough for all the others who have become our distinguished guests, visiting this tiny plot of land and finding it exactly where they’d like to live out their lives.

There’s very, very little that we can do about the world outside our hedgerow. Certainly, we scatter some seeds beyond our borders, and some of them take root and thrive. But what matters most is the space we’ve created here, the hospitality we offer and the refuge we provide for those eager to visit.

I feel it’s no accident that this all arose from a desperate need to make sense of a senseless world. As I said, it was my husband’s work burnout that began this transformation, a crisis much bigger than just one person. What is burnout, after all, except a recognition that the work we do to maintain something we don’t want or need can just be stopped? In other words, we are all burning out, immolating ourselves to keep the engines of an inhuman machine running for just a little longer. But finally, our bodies decide to put out those flames, to heal, and to let something new kindle in what’s left of us.

And I think especially on how it was a small packet of seeds and a shovel that healed him because that’s also what can heal the rest of us, too. The same has healed me many times throughout my life. Arriving at the futility of all things, at the complete meaninglessness of modern life and its illusory concerns, I’ve wandered broken into my gardens to put seeds into dirt. Each time, I’ve been aware of how irrelevant and useless such actions are in light of the problems I’m currently facing, and each time I’ve done it anyway.

It’s in all ways like a desperate prayer or a cry for help. And it’s always answered. Somethings and someones arrive to inhabit the sanctuaries you didn’t realize you had just built for them. As if to shrines for unnamed gods, the distinguished guests arrive to create a new world with you the way worlds have always been built. They croak and caw and bark and chirp the kind of very old future we forgot we are also able to inhabit.

The world is a mess and will only get worse. But that world isn’t our world. That world — the world of wars and strife and empty glittering things — has no place for beauty and no place for us. Instead, all that is possible and all that is powerful are the worlds we create around us, the sanctuaries we build for the distinguished guests who arrive to create with us. Not one sanctuary and not one garden, but many sanctuaries and many gardens. Connected and transversed by the flights of birds and the commutes of hares, not one world, but many, many worlds built by each of us and where we welcome each other also as distinguished guests.