Meadow in the sky

I lost a garden, but I grew a new one. I can grow wildflowers anywhere.

A True Life Built is a living photo essay on starting over and building a truer life. It’s for anyone, at any age, who is finding the courage to begin again. Subscribe for free weekly posts.

At the start of 2020, I lived in Nairobi and believed myself rooted in Kenya. I thought I had dug myself firmly into the red soil with my steady job, my newly built home, and the glorious acre of garden I had just coaxed into bloom.

I wandered my wild meadow each morning, drinking coffee and greeting the growing things: good morning acacias and pomegranates, good morning craggy cactuses and bursts of bougainvillea tumbling down the hill. Good morning birds feasting on pink grasses and sprays of small white butterflies drifting on the breeze like confetti.

“How lucky I am,” I’d think to myself. “This is where I’ll grow old.”

But when Covid broke, my ties to Kenya tore like tissue paper in the wind. When I blew back into Brooklyn a few months later, I felt like a tumbleweed, belonging to nowhere and no one.

I hadn’t just lost a garden, I’d lost my faith in security itself.

Self-portrait with my feather reed grass. August 2022.

I was raised with a deep faith in my own competence, in my ability to shape the arc of my life. I made plans, with spreadsheets, and mostly they came true.

Achievement, it seemed, was the great imperative. The formula was simple: Work hard, achieve things, feel stable. I confidently stacked one trophy on top of the next: Earn straight As, graduate college early, climb the career ladder. Date your college crush, get married, build a dream home. Once my pile of trophies was complete, then I would be too.

“You have always struck me,” a friend said recently, “as one of the most ferociously capable people I’ve ever met.” I smiled at this, but also flinched.

She wasn’t wrong: I’d built my identity around this fierce competence, around my picture-perfect house and glorious garden. But the striving left me brittle, hollowed out by the constant strain of holding things together. And if it could all tear so easily, if everything I’d built could vanish overnight, then what was all the achieving for?

It’s not that hard work doesn’t matter; it does. But no matter how carefully you’ve laid out the pieces of your life, there are reckonings that swoop in sideways and suddenly reset the whole board. When it happens—and it will—you can scramble to put the pieces back in their old places, or you can start playing a different game.

Here’s the humbling truth of it: my competence built me a gilded cage and chaos set me free. I’ll be forever grateful that I didn’t get what I thought I wanted.

Flowering switchgrass and purple sage. August 2022.

The word humility, I learned recently, comes from the Latin root humilis, which means grounded or of the earth. How fitting, I think, for the loss of my garden humbled me, stripping away my veneer of control. Yet it was in that void, that powerless place, that new ways of being started to root.

I haven’t yet made peace with change; we’re frenemies at best. I still struggle daily with a deep need to achieve, to earn gold stars and prove my worth, and probably will forever. But that is no longer the whole story, and I no longer feel hollow.

I’ve rebuilt my meadow in Brooklyn now, on my postage stamp patio in the sky. I know that if it disappears tomorrow, I have it within me to build it again. It’s not the garden that defines me, it’s the love of gardening. I can grow wildflowers anywhere.

I still drink my coffee and greet the growing things: good morning switchgrass, with your sprays of seeds like fireworks. Good morning lacy dragonflies hovering on the ox-eyes and bees nuzzling the purple sage. Good morning climbing roses, stretching for the sky, and herbs exhaling lemon and mint.

I tend my mini meadow and it nurtures me in return. I no longer see it as a trophy but as a living meditation. The flowers don’t care what I’ve achieved, they simply offer their faces to the sky and their pollen to the bees. Day after day, they go about the joyful business of living—and for now, that is enough.

Bleeding heart ox-eyes and purpletop vervain. August 2022.

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One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. If something resonates with you, I’d love for you to leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!

Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn. She’s spent her career finding the right words for others and now she’s finding her own.