Relating to the Garden, not Extracting From It

Written By Lior Laskowski

Written July 2 2025

For the first time in my life, I am understanding the garden as medicine. And it is built on the foundation of relationship and intention. Relationships that I have built with commitment, dedication, and humility.

Over the past year, I have found myself on a journey of returning into reciprocal relationship that has transformed every aspect of my life. In Fall of 2024, I began an interspiritual/interfaith seminary program and we turned to study Earth-based traditions and Indigenous spirituality from Turtle Island and Yorubaland. One of our teachers, Pat McCabe / Woman Stands Shining, invited us in to greeting the morning, making offerings to the Earth, and asking to remember how to be in sacred reciprocity with all of Life. I’ve been with it ever since, deepening and expanding and widening, and it has totally changed me.

In the years before this, I was doing ancestral work and lineage reclamation and healing. I was doing decolonial and liberatory work, and trying to unlearn the white supremacy within. But I was doing all of this from a place of detachment to the Earth. I was unknowingly moving in a way that objectified the land, plants, animals, and even Spirit. I was carrying the extractive and individualist mindset of capitalist colonial patriarchy into my spiritual practices.

I began to see this only when I began to see the Earth as a living being, and myself as a being in relationship with all others. This shift in worldview showed me all of the ways in which I was not in right relationship, and called me in to make changes. When I began to see all of the more-than-human beings around me as conscious, en-Spirited beings, and as my teachers and guides, my interactions with the world around me and the choices I made shifted.

Every day, I am with the plants and animals and land, greeting them with my prayers and offerings. I bring my gratitude, I ask for forgiveness, I listen. I bring offerings of food, drink, and song. I seek permission to harvest and I listen when it is an “no”.

And from this place — with time, dedication, and humility — I feel we are in relationship.

I’ve recently gone through some very difficult months, with medical crisis after medical crisis. My nervous system has been wrecked with stress and adrenaline. The garden, the plant relatives I have come to begin to know and learn from, have held me. And I can feel that the medicines they offer me are imbued with love and potency. With every sip, I carry the love of Chamomile, Calendula, Holy Basil, Skullcap, and Lemon Balm into my flesh.

I have used herbal medicine in various capacities for many years. I have even been gifted herbal medicine for ceremony made by people working in relationship with the land. But in deeply committing myself to opening up to a relational worldview — which is an Indigenous worldview, by the way — everything is transformed. My experience is different, because it is rooted in reciprocal relationship. The teas I am drinking are not made for flavor or for a utilitarian view of fuel for the body. They are spiritually nourishing and energetically healing — they are love, turned into form. It is only now, within the commitment of my relationship to the land, the more-than-human community, and our Great Earth Mother, done in a way that centers Indigenous wisdom taught by Indigenous lineage holders, that I can say I finally understand and receive these plant relatives as true, healing medicine. I can try to explain it with words, but you have to experience it for yourself.

The times we are in call for many things. We each have different roles to play and will walk different paths. What I have come to know in my own journeying is the primacy of the need to heal, within our own bodies minds and hearts, the wound of separation from the Earth. The wounds of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Especially for those of us who are white-bodied and who are answering the call to show up for justice and liberation work. No one can do it for us, and we cannot do it for others. And if we do not do it ourselves, we will unknowingly carry the extractive, individualistic colonial mind in all that we do — even our spiritual and healing work.

For without healing and liberating our primary relationship to our Mother Earth, how can we truly evolve any other relationship?

And if we are not grounded in sacred relationship to the Earth, how deeply and authentically can we really connect to the cosmos, astral, and ethereal realms?

And if we cannot be in sacred reciprocal relationship with our animal and plant kin here, how could we enter into authentic sacred relationship with Spirit itself?

I believe that as a white-bodied person, this is my personal work. I share with you here from my own personal journey and reflections, so that it might stir something within you that inspires you to face these things within yourself. I speak not as an expert, but a student. A beginner, even!!! But we must try, we must do, we must learn. I deeply believe that this work of healing from the colonial capitalist patriarchal worldview and returning to an Indigenous worldview is the work of our lives, and the time to do it is now.

Yesterday, as I gathered the arugula seeds from the garden, I was suddenly struck with the realization that every plant I am working with and that is nourishing me is the result of a lineage of hundreds, of thousands, of seed keepers who have taken the great care to store and protect the seeds, so that future generations could plant. And isn’t that so for all of us? I exist because I was dreamed. I was birthed. I was created of the impulse towards love.

Holding that tiny seed in my hand, reflecting on all of the connections that bind us, I feel less alone and less unprepared for what life is asking of us.

We are here, now, in this moment of creation. And yet, we are part of something much greater. We carry the dreams, love, and wisdom of all those who came before us, and they journey with us, supporting from the unseen realms. And we carry within us, nestled deep in some dark corner, the dreams and the love that will birth new generations, new worlds, new futures.

We need to nurture the potential of the seeds that exist deep within us, and give them time to grow and mature. Then, we must protect them, share them, spread them and plant them — and ultimately trust that we are playing our role in a grand, grand story of the eternal expansion of Life.

The lifecycle of the plants reminds me that if the world is always ending, then the world is also always being born. As the plant dies back and withers on the stalk, the seed matures.

In times such as these — of famine, war, and catastrophe — protecting and saving seeds becomes that much more important. That much more vital to our collective survival.

So let us be the seed keepers. Saving literal seeds of the food and medicine we need to survive, and also our energetic seeds of the world to come: a world filled with revolutionary love, nonviolent resistance, forgiveness, unity, hope, abundance, joy, and reverence for our Earth Mother.

We hold these seeds. May we keep them safe and nurture them. May we share them freely amongst ourselves, spreading and planting, so that future generations may harvest them, and continue the sacred role of passing them on to the next generation.

I offer my gratitude to the Indigenous wisdom keepers worldwide who have kept their sacred teachings alive, against great odds and at horrific cost. I offer my gratitude to the lineages of teachers that have shaped me and helped to birth these insights within me, including those named below, and many more.

I thank Dra. Rosales Mesa, for her teachings from the Q’ero Inca lineage that I am blessed to receive in a small group setting through the container of “Divine Alignment” and the “Alignment Sanctuary” (she is now enrolling for a course on decolonial shadow work for white-bodied folks — go sign up); Pat McCabe / Woman Stands Shining for her teachings offered to me and my seminary class from the Lakota and Diné traditions; Rev. Dr. Iya DeShannon for her teachings offered to me and my seminary from the Ifa Orisa tradition of Yorubaland; my teachers at One Spirit for the curriculum and conversations around Indigenous perspectives, worldviews, and psychologies; and Marika Clymer for the 2021/2 work done on ancestral healing and energetic ecology in small group setting that planted seeds for where I am today.

Books that I have learned deeply from:

Lior Laskowski
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