It is chiefly in our willingness to come together and share in each others’ lives, that we might call ourselves a community—and so it is my pleasure to address you as such!
We are, after all, here in a community garden. This term, ‘community garden’, I think, is worthy of further exploration. We can understand its typical meaning as something like, ‘a common place for people to gather in order to cultivate and harvest plants for eating.’ But I think that is an insufficient accounting.
Your Community
I would invite you to consider your community—your neighbors—as including the flora and fauna, both wild and cultivated, that also inhabit this place. And to consider that the garden is, in a sense, a community unto itself. I can assure you as someone who spends a lot of time here, that the bees and the fungi and the flowers and the trees all interact with each other, and take part in networks of exchange. A kind of hyperlocal business guild. They have homes and families and food preferences, just as we do. The birds are as inclined to conversation as ourselves.
And their relationship to this place is specific and geographically limited. We enjoy the ability to travel across the globe, and to draw upon resources from the farthest corners of the earth. But it may be that an intimate relationship with a place— even a small place like this, within a global city —can teach us a great deal about living within certain limits. As we come to know a place like this and its inhabitants, we can understand that in the small-scale, the particular, the local, the handmade, may lie the greatest and most convivial pleasures, in addition to the most sustainable ways of inhabiting our place.
My time here has been an education in neighborliness. I thank you all for that opportunity. Please go into the world with some idea of this place, and all of your neighbors here.
