My garden is practically feral. I recently trundled out in my kimono and gum boots to let the horses in to eat the tangle of grass and weeds. The goats bleated at me like school children, so I let them in as well - and why not swing the chicken gate open while I’m at it?
Winter is coming and the garden could use some grazing and scratching.
The goats climbed the bean trellis and stood in the raised beds. The horses trampled the snaking remains of my butternut squash vines to get at the oat grass that sprouted from my mulch. Thistles abound, nothing is labelled, and somewhere amidst the woven grass is one of my long-lost gardening gloves.
I believe they call this chaos gardening. I may not have gotten pumpkins the size of Volkswagens, or unblemished kale, but I got enough, and the microbiome danced beneath me, untilled, nourished, and blanketed with flora.
As I kept an eye on the animals, I plucked a leaf of mallow and let it brew in my teacup. My little sunshine mare, white and palomino in colour, slowly backed into me for some butt scratches. The mare who spent her life mostly untouched in a pasture, must be approached mindfully, as to not remind her of her seven-year aversion to humans.
In my line of work, I’m often tethered to a device, and the boundlessness of weeds, and stars, and deep-sea trenches are lost on me. But when my head is bowed into a phone, the inconceivable universe still stretches out around me in all directions whether I notice or not. The half-wild things lead me back to the wonder of it all.
Bits of wilderness in my little domesticated corners can be such a wonderful reminder that I’m not separate from nature. Even the polyester in my pyjamas was once pumped from the earth.
What happens to your perspective when you start to make those connections? When your Tiffany lamp is lightening in the sand and the calendar on your wall is just the sun’s secretary.
Though dogs may be the poster children of domesticity, some of us might have tiny jaguars shredding our couches and peeing in the monstera pot. They are claws and teeth and fur that eviscerate songbirds, yet sleep curled up on our beds at night.
Maybe the woodstove starts looking like your living room is wearing a forest fire in a locket, and maybe you start wondering if your house plants have a sense of you, and maybe you start remembering that the art on your walls are the fever dreams of cave paintings. How fun is that?
When I start to notice the half-wild things, I’m grounded. I’m momentarily emancipated from the grind. Feeling kindred to the wild is a sturdy place to release all my human nonsense.
I don’t need to pin a coyote down for a cuddle when I can put my restless hands on a goat getting fluffy for winter. I can close my laptop and make a cup of tea from well water.
