This garden flower tablecloth, and inversion, is the 2025 holiday illustration.
Tall trees and light wells. Harmony, care, effort, and intention without control. Culture is a garden and everything that takes root will grow.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the wonders of Ithilien and Imladris, the sacred whenua of Ihumātao… what about Eden?
One interpretation is that the Garden of Eden was the substance of God, a spiritual body of divine consciousness, for Adam and Eve to reside within perfect union and harmony. A beautiful conception whose literal realness was all but dispelled by evidence for human evolution. A potent metaphor nonetheless… perhaps more?
The point is this. The world is a garden and everything that takes root can grow. Technology has envigorated our ability to plant seeds in minds across the globe. Now the garden of culture grows evermore within a patrolled greenhouse, fed on a seemingly infinite pile of corporate bullshit. The message is something like “eat our poisoned apple and there won’t be any trouble,” but there is always trouble.
Forget all that bullshit.
Forget it all.
We each get to plant our seeds in the earth where a billion of our ancestors lived and survived, against all odds, for us to be.
Choose to plant seeds of courage, kindness, restraint, patience, ingenuity, celebration, clear thinking, action, generosity, and sound judgement. Water them with your sweat, tears, and blood if you have to.
Just as you stand on a pyramid of a billion ancestors, stretching back through generations beneath your feet, so too stretches from your crown an expanding cone of a billion descendants waiting for their turn to live into a loving future. Maybe they will literally be your kids and grandkids-kids, but more likely they will be people who benefitted indirectly from your legacy.
That’s why, above all else, plant seeds of love for things that live.
Kia Kaha & Happy New Year 2026!
1 January 2026, The Golden Wood.
