The Garden and the gardener

We were not given the blueprint.

Well. Some of us may have been fortunate enough to have had a wonderfully supportive Divine Masculine archetype shown to them in their formative years—if you’re one of those people, reach out, I’d love to hear that story—but for most of us, at least I can speak for myself when I say: I was given the natural disaster template.

This template forced me into the jungle. I knew chaos too intimately to ever trust the way of the garden.

I was never shown what it was like to be watered by a man. Not by my father. Not by my grandfather. Not a loyal uncle anywhere in sight. Two men hardened by war, though neither served. My father was the son of an army colonel—all that rage and rigidity passed down like silverware. My grandfather fled Italy before they could conscript him. They both escaped serving the military, but my God, the military still found them. Through osmosis. Through the invisible loyalty system of family constellations. Through the way trauma moves like groundwater through a family field, seeping into everyone who stands on that land.

The pattern didn’t disappear, it just went underground.

It shattered somewhere between one generation’s mouth and the next generation’s ear, and so we had to learn by its shards. By what was missing. By the silences and the flinches.

Our parents could not show us what they themselves had never seen: a living, breathing architecture of masculine and feminine in true devotion. What they showed us instead was survival. Absence. The twisted shapes trauma makes when it tries to protect us. Overcorrection that becomes its own cage. And so the original pattern went down into the root systems. Into the body. Into the invisible family field where the dead still speak and the unresolved still waits.

It buried itself in bone. In the electric memory of fascia. In the body’s ancient yes and no that fires before the mind can intercept it with its clever doubts.

The Wild Woman lives there still. Epigenetically encoded. Wolves’ daughter. Keeper of the old ways of tending and being tended.

Woman is the garden.

Not because she is weak, not because she is owned, not because she is decoration for someone else’s pleasure—but because she is self-generating life. Gardens grow even when abandoned. Jungles grow even when cut back, even when burned, even when everyone has decided they are too wild, too much, too dangerous to let stand. The jungle is the most feral and destructive yes—chaotically cohesive, ancient beyond ancient, the original wild feminine that answers to no one. The feminine does not ask permission to prevail.

Many of us have been swallowed whole by that miraculous, feral jungle-self.

This is not failure, mama.
This is initiation by fire.

There is great wisdom in knowing when you are jungle and when you are garden. When to let the vines take the walls, and when to bring out the shears.

The jungle is where you learn discernment through consequence. Where you discover your edges the hard way—bruised shins, thorn-scratched arms, the taste of your own blood teaching you what is predator and what is prey. In the jungle, instinct sharpens until it could cut glass. Illusions die there. They have to.

The garden is where integration happens. Where rhythm replaces the animal urgency. Where devotion is practiced until it becomes instinct. Where you tend life patiently, deliberately, with your hands in the dirt and your face to the sun.

A woman who has never been jungle does not know the scope of her own power.
A woman who remains jungle forever never learns rest, and rest is where the fruit grows.

Man, when he is truly initiated, is the gardener.

Not the boy who envies the garden’s mystery and demands she abandon her rhythms to prove her worth in the marketplace of his approval.
Not the boy who wants harvest without seasons, roses without thorns, fruit without ever putting his hands in the soil or his back into the digging.

The initiated man chooses to tend what is sacred at the hearth.

He waters.
He amends the soil.
He watches the perimeter for what would devour.
He understands, in his bones, that devotion multiplies itself like bread and fishes.

When a rose is tended year after year with true attention, it becomes something mythic. It climbs the walls of the house. It spills onto the neighbours property, and even reaches the corner store. Someone harvests to grow them down by the sea. This rose becomes a humble icon in community for its generous perfume. 

All because he chose to tend to you. Please open your eyes and receive him because his intention is not control. He is taking on the role of custodianship. This is the old way.

Jealous boys want women to scatter themselves in the marketplace—not because work itself is wrong, but because they do not yet trust the invisible wealth of devotion. They mistake motion for provision. Busyness for safety. They confuse output with value because no one taught them to see the immeasurable.

But a man who has done his own descending sees something else entirely.

He sees that a woman tending the hearth is not idle. She is generating life force itself. She is doing the most ancient and essential work there is.

The hearth is not small.
The hearth is axis mundi. The center pole. The world tree.

The woman tends the inner fire:
Timing. Nourishment. Atmosphere. Emotional climate. Ancestral memory. The continuity of all that is holy and human.

The man tends the outer fire:
Protection. Provision. Structure. Boundary. Direction. The interface with chaos.

When these two fires are tended consciously—not hierarchically, not with one devouring the other—they feed each other. They create a third thing that neither could create alone.

Pay attention, because it isn’t dependency nor dominance.
It is Alchemical Reciprocity.

Many of us had to learn this without elders. Without anyone to show us the steps to the old dances.

We were shown abundantly what the masculine should not be—absent, uninitiated, resentful, violent, collapsed into boyhood at forty or fifty or sixty. And so the psyche, which is wiser than we give it credit for, did something intelligent.

It began collecting images of distortion until the original shape became visible by contrast. Like learning what a deer looks like by studying its tracks in snow.

This is the path of the Animus Jung spoke of. The inner masculine every woman carries.

At first, he appears in his wounded forms. The critic who cuts you down. The seducer who makes promises he has no intention of keeping. The tyrant. The eternal boy who wants mothering. You seek him in the outer world because he has not yet taken root in the inner one.

And so you keep finding what you were shown in childhood.
Don’t even for a second believe it’s because “you’re broken.” It’s because this is earth school, and you. are. learning. 

The soul is trying to teach you something by repetition.

Until the lesson fills you to the brim and you can hold no more.

And then—through grief, through boundary-making, through the body’s wisdom, through fierce grace and remembering of the wild one—the transmutation happens.

You become the structure you were never given.

The original masculine blueprint rises up from inside you:
Presence without domination.
Protection without control.
Provision without resentment.
Direction without rigidity.
Strength that creates safety, not fear.

At that moment, the psyche no longer seeks a man to save the garden from chaos.

She knows how to tend herself. How to prune. How to rest in winter. How to protect what is tender.

She becomes the garden with a gate.

And only then—only then—can the true gardener appear.

He will not arrive under the guise of savior. He will not enter as a new project for you to fix or complete. He will enter as a mirror. And if you stay present enough with what reflects back, if you don’t flinch from what you see—that mirror becomes a portal. A doorway into the kind of love that doesn’t ask you to abandon yourself to find it.

This is sovereignty.

The rose remembers she was once wild jungle.
The jungle permits herself to become a garden.

And the masculine, at last, arrives not to conquer—but to witness the holy privilege of tending.

Because this is what the initiated man knows in his bones: to tend a woman who has reclaimed herself is not a burden. It is not a favour. It is not charity or sacrifice.

It is privilege.

It is getting to watch what happens when you give good soil everything it needs and then stand back in awe as it does what only it can do. As it transforms everything you offer into something you could never create alone.

This is the dance. The oldest one. The one that makes God smile because God gets to experience Himself through it—through us.

We are the soil. The rich, dark earth. The place where everything transforms.

And the man, when he understands his role, when he’s done his own descent and return—he watches what we do with what he gives.

He prunes, and we grow differently.
He waters, and we fruit.
He provides shade, and we become shelter.
He keeps the pests at bay, and we bloom more abundantly than either of us thought possible.

It is constant. This give and take. This holy reciprocity.

Never transactional—always alchemical.

He brings structure, and we bring life force. He brings protection, and we bring transformation. He brings direction, and we bring the capacity to hold it all, to gestate it, to turn it into something neither of us could birth alone.

And with each cycle, we both build more capacity.

More capacity means more blessings can move through us. More love. More creativity. More resources. More beauty. More life.

The garden doesn’t stay the same size. It expands. It climbs. It spills over into places you never planned. It renames everything it touches.

And he gets to watch this.
He gets to tend this.
He gets to be part of this miracle.

This is how the masculine and feminine, when they are each whole and sovereign and consciously devoted, become the closest thing to God experiencing Himself in union with another.

Two fires tending each other. Two gardens, two gardeners, creating a third thing—a holy between-space where love compounds like interest, where devotion multiplies like loaves and fishes, where every season brings more than the last because you have learned how to tend what is sacred together.

But to get here, we had to learn surrender again.

The woman has to learn to surrender to the man in trust. In allowing herself to be tended. In softening enough to receive what she spent so long learning to provide for herself.

And the man has to learn to surrender to the woman—in devotion. In bowing to her rhythms. In trusting that her way of moving through the world is as essential as his own.

Something was out of balance before. Way before. Generations before.

Maybe the masculine became too rigid, too demanding, too hungry for control. Maybe the feminine became too accommodating, too self-abandoning, too afraid of her own wildness. Maybe both happened at once, each distortion feeding the other until no one remembered what the original dance looked like.

And so here we are. Course-correcting. Remembering. Excavating the blueprint from our own bones because no one could hand it to us whole.

We were never shown this.

But look—look—at what we have learned. Look at who we have had to become in the process of finding our way back. Look at the strength it took to stay in the jungle long enough to know our power. Look at the courage it took to become a garden again without guarantees. Look at what the masculine had to face in himself to show up as gardener instead of conqueror.

This is what we were never shown.
This is what we get to become.

The ones who broke the pattern. The ones who did the work our ancestors couldn’t. The ones who will be remembered not for what we were given, but for what we became in spite of it—and then, finally, because of it.

To all of my people choosing Union. Choosing the way of devotion.

The wild explorer and the wild jungle—both of you who went out into the world to see what was there, to test yourselves against the elements, to learn what you’re made of—and then came back home because you discovered:
the real treasure was never out there.

The man who explored every horizon and then chose to become gardener, knowing this is where it’s at. That tending what is sacred at home is not settling—it’s arriving. It’s the culmination of everything he learned in the wild.

The woman in me who became jungle to survive, who learned to thrive in the wild until she knew every inch of her power—and then chose to become garden. I don’t want to be tamed. I’m not broken nor domesticated. But I finally choose the gardener. One worthy of tending to me and soil rich enough to hold all I am.

We both had to go out to know what home could be.

And now you know: the true reward after all the risk is a home you create together. Not the one you inherited. Not the one that broke you. But the one you build, consciously, devotedly, with both fires burning eternally.

This is holy work. This is provision. This is the Glory. 
This is what we came here for.