Invisible Gardeners

I watch boxes filled with years—photographs, pens, notebooks—carried out of buildings without ceremony. This is the violence of sudden absence. When they tell my colleagues to leave, there are no reasons that hold light. When they speak of destroying entire departments, I examine each word for a crack to climb through. There is none.

In German, common sense translates to "healthier understanding." I think about this often. What health might look like in decision-making. How understanding requires both care and attention. We carry this potential inside us—all of us—this ability to discern what nurtures and what harms.

Power is not merely transferred; it is entrusted. Like a seed given with instructions for its care. Those who receive it become temporary gardeners of something that will outlive them. Yet some mistake the garden for property, uprooting what has taken decades to grow, dismissing the gardeners who know the soil's secrets.

I think of people who have spent their lives in service. How their knowledge resides in their hands, their eyes, their quiet understanding of systems. How bodies leave rooms while their absence expands to fill the space, yet their legacy continues, invisible but persistent, like roots extending beneath disturbed earth.

What remains when institutions empty? Memories of purpose. Outlines of intention. The faint impression of what was built with care, now dismantled without it.

So what is hope in this? What must we preserve in silence, and what must we release as righteous fury? Our voices hover between seasons—not yet silenced, not yet fully awakened. We drive our shovels into frozen earth, the action our bodies remember without thought. The harsh metallic sound of chang pierces our ears, but still we put our whole strength into turning over the soil, preparing the ground that appears dead but secretly holds life, waiting for light that will arrive unannounced, that will touch what lies beneath our labor. The life, the light that persists despite everything in everywhere.