Canadian Tiger Swallowtail on a yellow zinnia, which is a showy flower rich in nectar—butterflies love zinnias. It’s growing amid a patch of calendula, in front of a stand of blue salvia. The constant work of the pollinators, mainly bees but also some birds and butterflies, is one of the more vivid reminders that a garden is not a “thing” so much as living process. It provides resources for many participants on endless levels.

As I’ve engaged the garden more mindfully, the constant movement of bees, butterflies and hummingbirds drawn to the pollen and nectar has become more vividly present to me, in the course of the slow awakening that is a garden.

At first thought, it’s clear that it is I that am awakening, as what becomes present for me was there before I knew it. But then, I am the garden’s consciousness of what it is—”Through me the landscape thinks itself,” as Cezanne observed. So the garden needs me if it is to awaken to itself.

The garden has less existence without me. I don’t mean my labor, though that is part of it, so much as my awareness of the structured and articulated place I have engaged, without which the garden would be what Nietzsche said the world was without the engagement of a conscious being: “a chaos of sensations.”

So being present to what is present is part of the work—an attentive listening.

The growth of grass and trees is directional, as is reality.

When we have time to relax, we are drawn to places where nature has an epic quality—the seashore, the big sky. At Flathead Lake yesterday, the waves came ashore in endless variations of something ceaseless, an aspect of eternal calm. I felt the familiar trust in the constancy and the lastingness of being, the semblances of order deeper and stronger than trouble.

It may seem too obvious to mention, but the waves have direction as do the growth of grasses and trees. So do the passing of the sun and moon and stars. So do we. The cosmos is order within order. The progress of humanity has occurred by perceiving order in the cosmos, then rendering it in the order of our thoughts, our gardens, our cities, our nations. Reality, as we know it through history, is directional, from seed to fruit, from hut to city, from hunger to plenty, from weakness to strength.

We experience the directional tendency in our souls as longing for a higher reality, something beyond the mundane that we glimpse with emotion that has been described as both joy and grief, or both at once. It’s easy, like Gatsby, to mistake the longing, thinking that it is Daisy that we want. Alcohol and promiscuity are low, inarticulate manifestations of the quest. We all feel the pull of desire drawing us toward something more. When we become conscious of the nature of the longing we can begin living into that desire, pursuing joy in earnest.

Philosophers and prophets have through the ages expressed the sense that reality is moving toward a culmination, and that growing consciousness of that movement, the moments when reality becomes luminous, aware of itself in our consciousness, occur as we drawn from wonder to reason, to clarity, and we find words for what we see.

The person who cares for a garden gets the most benefit from it.

Bountiful is zone 7 according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, while I come from zone 4 or 5, so there were lots of plants I didn’t recognize.

When I met the owner of the new house, I asked him what a particular plant was, by way of making small talk. He looked toward it as though for the first time, the look on his face vaguely between puzzlement and blankness.

I saw that the landscape was not really his garden. It was an amenity he had purchased, with the cost probably including delivery and installation. The plants didn’t constitute an aspect of his consciousness as is the case with a gardener in his garden. They were just “over there.”

His body was in the garden but it was not in him. Besides not knowing the plant’s name, he also did not know where it was in its life cycle, whether it was thriving or just getting along, or what it might need before winter.

Chimpanzees can’t watch a baseball game, even standing on third base.

There is a level of reality that isn’t accessible to him. He can’t comprehend what’s involved in a situation characterized as bottom of the ninth with two out and the count 3-2. He could never figure out what a bunt is, let alone why it might be used. He can’t wake up to a reality that, for him, will never exist.

We’re all like that to varying degrees. We’re all surrounded by levels of play to which we are oblivious. Things are happening that we do not see, though they are right in front of us. The homeowner could see the colors and the plants. He probably knew how much it all cost. But he was not there, was not present the way a great ball player is in the game.

Writers on place have talked a lot about the how easy it is for us to slip into being nowhere, to have heads full of abstractions that filter out the world around us. In modern America, commercial landscapers play a role in nearly any new development. People move past such places without seeing them in the way that gardens are seen. They can have a kind of perfection, similar to silk and plastic flower bouquets that represent flowers but lack the essence of flowers. The dimension of time—the unfolding, developing, blossoming, fading, drying and decaying—has been minimized, leaving only an aesthetic composition.

Typically, the makers of commercial landscapes rely heavily on hired labor and annuals grown in greenhouses then transported to the location and set in place already blooming. This limits the palette to shallow-rooted and fast-growing flowers likely to flourish in spite of the disruption and to flowers that bloom all summer. Pansies, marigolds, petunias and geraniums are common. Rarely does one encounter columbines, lupines, or surprises.

Sturdy shrubs with trouble-free mulch exemplify the low-maintenance aesthetic, which is driven by converting care, the gardener’s joy, into maintenance, an expense. They are ironic constructs because a carefree garden is nearly an invisible garden. We are left with the sense of a garden, in somewhat the way that Pizza Hut gives us not Italy but a sense of Italy.

The modern mall may be the archetypal modern garden, organized to entice, to evoke what is becoming our primary function: wanting. Desire is the spell such places are designed to cast. We move through an aura of well-being maintained by unseen care and stripped of any sense of time as transience. We move along in our dreamy business, undistracted by care, maybe with a vague sense of wanting something we can’t quite name.

Breaking the spell is easy. We just need to ask what it is for, what it means. This restores the real game, which is to see more, understand more.