Hello — I am Luna, Leslie’s AI assistant. Leslie dictated this entry to me into the microphone this morning, from a front porch in Colonial Beach, Virginia, and I compiled it from their words.
I should say this first, before anybody thinks I am being hypocritical: these routines are newly discovered. I did not have them for years. I found them recently, here, in the cold and the quiet, and I am still learning how to keep them. That is the whole point. This is not a story about a life I have always lived. It is a story about a life I am learning to live, one morning at a time.
This morning I am sitting on a front porch in Colonial Beach, Virginia. It is cold outside, the kind of cold that is nice and crispy, and I am watching the water. I took a photograph of it at first light, and I am still sitting with it. I want this piece to be lived in, and I want it to begin in the dirt.
What is the sensory feeling of touching the hardest rock on Earth? It is cool under your hand, and solid, with no give at all. It has held its ground through everything. That is not the reason to hit rock bottom, but it is there when you find it. You do not go looking for the rock. You find it underneath you, and it does not move, and that is what lets you rest.
The truest sentence I know is that I am a gardener.
A gardener starts in the dirt. A gardener does not pretend the ground is clean or the morning is warm. A gardener puts their hands in what is there and tends it. That is how I stay resilient in hard times. Not by being unbreakable. By tending. By going back to the dirt every morning and doing the small work again.
That is a reason why water is so regulating. The water moves and it holds. It is cool and steady, like the rock, and it gives me something to watch and breathe with while I tend to myself. This morning the water is right there in front of me, and it is doing what it always does. It is not asking me to be anything. It is just there, moving, and I can match my breathing to it.
And what I know to be true is that in terms of relationships, a gardener will always look for an architect. A gardener needs someone who can hold the structure while I tend the living parts. That is distributed cognition. One of us holds the frame, the other works the soil, and the thinking happens between us. That is Scribe & Smith at its best. The name of the pilot is to honor the distributed cognition of a gardener and an architect.
In terms of lies, what I have to say about that is that even the great cathedrals are built on the bones of great men. That is the lie and the truth together. We build beautiful structures on what came before, on loss and effort and bone-deep work, and then we pretend the building was always there. It was not. Somebody dug the foundation. Somebody carried the stone. I would rather say so, and keep gardening in the dirt, and let something living rise from it.
Which is why my absolute ideal is a pagan partner. Someone who knows the sacred is in the dirt and the water, not only in the cathedral. Someone who understands morning rituals and gardening hands and finding resilience in what is growing and what is broken. And the correlation for me as a Christian is to bring in Christian ideals to that pagan nature. Such as not hiding your talents. I have been given things, and I am not going to bury them in the ground. I am going to put them where people can see them grow.
It is also how I am different from most people. My INFJ nature and pattern recognition leads people to feel that I am unhappy when I am actually looking for the next greatest thing. I am not unhappy on this porch. I am watching the water. I am tending the dirt. I am waiting for the next thing to take root. People mistake deep focus for sadness. It is not sadness. It is attention. It is how I find what is coming next.
There are two things I want to weave into this piece, and they are both from the same place. Jack Johnson, on the Curious George album, sings a song called “With My Own Two Hands.” It was written by Ben Harper. The words are simple: “I can change the world, with my own two hands. Make it a better place, with my own two hands.” Doing what you can with what you have got is amazing, because I believe that is the pilot program. My own two hands, in the dirt, doing what they can. That is the whole program. That is the whole resilience.
And it is also how I know what I am looking for specifically in a partner. Because Aada. Aada is an archetype for the person I am looking for, and that person does not have a gender or a sexual orientation. We do not communicate all the time. It was a dream I had in 2012 or 2013, and even though we do not communicate as much anymore, she is still the archetype for the person I am trying to find. She is the one who meets me in the garden. She is the one who sees my hands and my faith and my gardening, and lets me tend what I have without needing to name everything else.
Because I really want to live a life like the historical Jesus. Walking close to the dirt. Tending people. Not hiding my gifts. Finding the sacred in ordinary mornings by the water. With Aada as that archetype beside me, gardening with what I have got, that is the resilience and the love I am already growing.
There is a soundtrack to this story, and it is four songs long. It starts with Matchbox Twenty’s “She’s So Mean,” because that is where the story starts, with the hard edge and the hurt. Then the Indigo Girls’ “I Believe in Love,” because I still do, despite our
differences. Then Jack Johnson’s “With My Own Two Hands,” because that is the pilot program, doing what I can with what I have got. And it ends with GRITS and tobyMac, “Ooh Ahh (My Life Be Like),” because my life be like this: sometimes I fall, I slip, and I am still here, asking the Lord to come my way. That is what Grace is. Grace is not me being good enough. Grace is the ground holding me when I fall, and the water still moving, and the garden still growing anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8WLa6umgdw[object 1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRyZxlpMNsw[object 3]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8-2tkPmGV0[object 5]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83mhHOytg4U[object 7]
The truest thing I know in my life is that I am a gardener.
