What is a Gardener If They Can’t Garden?

As I lay here writing this on my phone from bed, just shy of 3 months on into this deep dive away from health that my body has taken, again, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a gardener when you can’t work the garden. I’ve been asking myself, “Can I even call myself a gardener anymore? What/who am I now?”

I still have indoor plants to tend, but some have been lost these months and most of the time I don’t feel like I am really “tending” anyway. I am doing what I can, hoping to be done quickly so I can lay down again. I don’t blame myself. I am so physically unwell all the time. There is virtually nothing to give.

It’s made me consider how ableist my concept of myself as a gardener has been all of these years. There is more to being a gardener than the accumulation of specific, ongoing acts. There are no badges to collect as you put in a defined number of hours. Yet it’s only been 3 months and already I am telling myself I can’t be a gardener anymore.

Where does this come from?

(I know its origins and its hold in me. Do you know where it comes from for you?)

I have always been a doer and have defined myself in that. I have assigned and attached much of my worth to the doing. For a long time I was a very good doer. Chronic illness and it’s constraints called a halt to all doing and I took it as an opportunity to launch a deeper examination of this. To unlearn and unhook myself from it more thoroughly. However, five years in and I am still unpacking, unlearning, and trying to create new definitions. The old ways and their stories cling to me tightly. They slough off in layers like old grime that has sunk in so deeply I’ve nearly forgotten what I looked like before.

I recite Mary Oliver daily. “You don’t have to be good.” * Doing is a joy and using my limbs and body to move and create is pleasure for me, but it is also how I make myself capital “G” Good, valuable, worthy. That second part is the problem.

How can we be gardeners if we can’t garden? I don’t know yet. I was one once, so maybe that’s forever. But perhaps the trouble here is that without meaning to, I’ve created an internal definition for gardener that is rooted in something I never wanted to be or conform to to begin with: An uppercase Gardener. Even worse, a Good one. Not just a gardener, but a Gardener. And not just a Gardener, but a Good Gardener. There are many layers to slough off.