There's a river guide named Tommy who took my family down the Colorado years ago. In the mornings, deep in the Grand Canyon with the walls glowing red above us, he would sing Guy Clark's "Homegrown Tomatoes." It's a goofy, perfect little song, an ode to the marvel of a ripe tomato, and it lands on a couplet that has stayed with me: only two things money can't buy, and that's true love and homegrown tomatoes.
Tommy sang it like a man who meant it. What I heard in it, echoing off that ancient rock, was the wild and free spirit that lives deep in the human heart, a flame that burns brightly in anyone who cares to nurture it. I filed the song away as charming. Then last summer I finally grew tomatoes worth eating, and I understood that Tommy had been telling the truth.
They were not impressive tomatoes. Three plants in pots, using store-bought potting soil -- nothing that would make a real gardener look twice. But they were undeniably, obviously better than anything from a store, and my toddler ate them straight off the vine. That alone was worth the season.
Most vegetables are not worth growing yourself. The cauliflower I tended for months tasted exactly like cauliflower from the supermarket. The French beans were fine, and my toddler liked them, and they fixed nitrogen back into the soil after the tomatoes had stripped it out, so there was a logic there. But the tomatoes were different. There is something in a homegrown tomato that storage and transit systematically destroy. The effort produces a genuinely different thing.
This is older wisdom than Guy Clark. It is the wisdom Voltaire arrives at, exhausted, at the end of Candide. After his hero survives earthquakes and wars and the collapse of every cheerful theory about why the world is the way it is, Voltaire gives him a single instruction: il faut cultiver notre jardin. We must cultivate our garden. Stop theorizing about the best of all possible worlds. Go tend the thing in front of you. It is not a counsel of retreat so much as a counsel of contact, the recognition that there is a kind of knowing you only get with your hands in the dirt.
That distinction -- between theorizing about the world and making contact with it -- is one I keep circling. Venkatesh Rao has a framing I find useful. Imagine you are on Buckminster Fuller's Spaceship Earth, hurtling not just along its familiar annual orbit but through a tangle of hidden, curled-up dimensions you can't see but can feel, the way you feel motion sickness in your gut. Two kinds of people emerge in response to that nausea. The first group retreats from it, stays close to things they can see and touch, and eventually concludes the hidden dimensions aren't real at all. The second group leans into the nausea, builds elaborate maps of the unseen trajectories, and comes to trust the maps so completely it forgets they are maps. The grass-touchers and the abstract map-makers, locked in a war neither can win. Rao's resolution is a third move: touching time. The practice that lets the map make contact with the territory, so the abstraction stays honest and the grass-touching stays meaningful.
There are ways to touch time at geological scale, what the Greeks knew as aeon -- to float through the Grand Canyon and feel the aeon in a glimpse, the way you can look at a layer of Ordovician limestone and know you are staring at the floor of a vanished sea, the moment four hundred million years ago just before the mass extinction swept the brachiopods away. That kind of contact does something to a person. But it is hard to sustain across a Tuesday. A garden is a way to wrestle daily with chronos, the relentless ticker of schedule and obligation, and kairos, the ripe moment that arrives unbidden and asks you to be present for it. Both come for you when you are responsible for a toddler and a newborn and duties to public service at the same time. The garden doesn't resolve that tension. It gives it a form you can work with.
I encountered the map-territory nausea viscerally, long before I had words for it, as a Coro fellow. The whole program was an exercise in being thrown between institutions fast enough that you could feel the vertigo -- from a union hall to a corporate boardroom to a campaign office, each with its own complete and self-consistent map of how the world works. I have been chasing the reconciliation ever since.
The garden insists on the contact. I learned about hard water the hard way this year. The water coming out of my La Crescenta tap carries a heavy load of dissolved calcium and magnesium, which over time crusts on leaves, clogs drip emitters, and nudges the soil pH into ranges that lock out the nutrients a plant needs. This is not exotic. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, roughly eighty-five percent of American homes have hard water, with the arid Southwest among the hardest. You can read all this. But reading about it and watching a tomato yellow despite your best efforts are different kinds of knowing. The territory supplies something the map cannot.
What I have come to appreciate is how AI changes the posture I bring to that territory. When aphids showed up on the peppers, when a colony of mushrooms erupted overnight in a bed I'd amended with wood chips, when I wanted to know whether my back slope catches enough February sun to start cool-weather crops given the local solar azimuth, I could ask and orient in the same motion. The point is not that the tool knows things a book doesn't. The point is the flow it enables: observe something in the world, ask what's going on, decide what to do, and act, all in one continuous loop, often with a toddler on my hip. It collapses the distance between noticing and understanding and acting. The aphids are best handled by inviting their predators. The mushrooms are probably benign and maybe helpful. February sun in these foothills is marginal for brassicas. None of that is hard to find. But finding it while standing in the garden, in the rhythm of the work itself, is what turns information into a different way of being present in the world.
I keep a Notion database I call the Bot Garden, a web-like log of ideas and notes in every stage of development. In this I am like a lot of wild-spirited, digitally native millennials -- a tangle of half-formed thoughts accreted over years, cross-linked and never quite organized. What's changed lately is that I've started running something like the Karpathy protocol on it: letting an AI work the raw pile of captures, interlinking them, maintaining an append-only log, compiling the tangle into something more legible than I could keep in my own head. Some entries are seeds, some are seedlings, some have been there long enough to put down roots. The parallel to the dirt garden is not decorative. The same practices make both productive: regular attention, willingness to prune, patience with slow growth, acceptance that not everything germinates.
What the physical garden has given me that the digital one hadn't is the weight of irreversibility, and the strange satisfaction of seeing your own action manifest in the world. Even three pots on a slope is a real change you made to the surface of this spaceship, a visible result on this pale blue dot adrift in a very large and indifferent cosmos. An idea in Notion can wait forever. A tomato plant runs on its own schedule.
This points at something about how time actually works in our institutions, and how badly. They run on two clocks and only two. There is the indefinite future, where anything to do with actual foresight goes to wait politely forever, and there is the immediate present, which arrives exclusively in the form of some very important person needing something right now. The seasonal middle distance, the register where a garden lives, where you act today because of what ripens in eleven weeks, barely exists in that world. The garden restores it. Things ripen. Seeds fail. Seasons turn. The irreversibility isn't a bug in the system. It is the system.
My father spent his career thinking about water -- moving it, governing it, allocating it across a very large and thirsty landscape. On that same Colorado float trip, while Tommy sang about tomatoes in the morning light, my dad was channeling his inner Cassandra, repeating it like a mantra: we're headed for hell, we're headed for hell. He didn't mean any rapid. He meant decades of accumulated intuition reading where things were flowing, the hydrologic reality of a shrinking river meeting the intractable politics of the water wars. That kind of knowing doesn't come from reports. It comes from a lifetime of touching territory until you feel the trajectory in your gut.
I think about this when I'm watering. A minute with a hose gives you a concrete sense of what it means to deliver water at scale -- what a gallon costs in time and energy and infrastructure, what it means for all those gallons to have to come from somewhere, what shortage actually feels like when the flow diminishes. My body knows it now. The water work I do is still mostly maps, demand projections and infrastructure models, but I trust those maps a little more, and distrust them a great deal more precisely, for having spent some hours with the real water and the real dirt.
The word "tend" comes from the Latin tendere: to stretch, to extend, to direct one's course toward something. It shares a root with attention and intention and tendency, the whole cluster of ways we describe the mind reaching toward what it cares about. To tend a garden is, in the oldest sense, to stretch toward it. To extend yourself into the gap between where you are and where the plant is, between what you know from reading and what the soil is actually doing, between the map you carry in your head and the territory that grows indifferent to your plans and wonderful in spite of them.
That stretching is the thing. Not the harvest, not the tidy beds, not the optimization of yield per square foot. The opportunity the garden offers is to reach across the divide between maps and territories, to feel through the gap, to grow ourselves alongside the plants and the inevitable wild spaces -- the volunteer tomato that comes up where nothing was planted, the mushrooms that arrive without invitation, the toddler who eats the beans straight off the stem before you can stop her. Tending, in this sense, is not a metaphor for something else. It is itself the practice. Voltaire knew it. Tommy knew it. The garden, indifferent and patient and ripe on its own schedule, keeps teaching it.
I had fun summarizing my garden related inquiries over the last year in Gemini.* I copied those into Claude, brain dumped a bit and iterated a few times to generate this post. Image credit: I used the text to image feature and VGR's bucket art model available on Titles dot xyz. I'm pretty happy with it 🙂
*I'm pretty basic in that I pay for Claude and use Gemini regularly for routine artificial librarian type of tasks since I've yet to encounter limit to the number of queries .
Touching Time
Or, the new adventures of Spaceship Earth
