On Blooming Outside the Garden Gate
Searching for Spirituality Outside of Eden
Leaving the belief system I grew up in left a huge hole in my life.
Not just physically with the loss of most of my friends, local community, and social connections (because when you’re knee deep in evangelical Christianity your entire world becomes it and you’re discouraged from having friends and relationships with “non believers” lest they tempt you away. This also happens to be one of the telltale signs of a cult and/or an abusive relationship.) but also in a loss of connection to my spirituality.
Hi. I’m Becka. I write about my reclamation journey which includes but isn’t limited to deconstructing my childhood faith, reclaiming agency over my body, abandoning hustle culture, exploring nature based spirituality, learning mimetic therapies like RRT and somatics, and my experience as a late diagnosed neurodivergent. Phew.
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How was I to celebrate holidays without the old familiar stories that made them feel meaningful? Did I get to marvel at a sunset anymore if I didn’t believe a white-passing man-savior in the sky painted it? Could I say I felt moved if it wasn’t by the Holy Spirit? Could I set my mind on an intention and meditate on it if I didn’t call it “prayer”? Could a rainbow be just a joy or a symbol of love instead of a thinly veiled threat from a violent Old Testament god? Was a life of meaning and magic only for the Christians?
There were a lot of questions. But the one that I struggled with more than all the rest was that if I was looking for meaning and connection again was I just trying to replace one numinous belief system with another? Was I in need of a crutch?
I began to judge my need to fill the hole. Did it mean I was weak minded? Was I like a child refusing to let go of the idea of Santa because believing in magic was comforting? Was I less intelligent than the atheists and intellectuals who didn’t seem to need it or to care?
Or was I just… sensitive to the mystery? Was I, at all times, compelled to notice it, call it out, and to attempt to name it? Seeing the magic in ordinary moments is a skill. It’s seeing what others miss. It is the ability to pull magic and mystery from the ether and hand it to someone too distracted to notice and say, “Look at this isn’t it beautiful?! Feel this moment. You are here.”
Even if it’s outside of organized religion.
Especially if it’s outside of it.
Slowly, I started to ask myself a new question:
What if yearning for and calling out meaning was not a weakness?
What if my desire for it was my map in the wilderness? For so long I was told there was no meaning outside the garden. To stop looking for what I already had.
Except I didn’t have it in there.
I had been conditioned to believe that if I didn’t find it there then I was somehow broken and needing fixing... saving. And that I was wrong to continue looking for it anywhere else. That if I willingly left, I had no right to still want it. Oof.
Spirituality is a part of our human experience. Religion is the framework humans put around it to make sense of it within their culture and point in history. How do we make sense of the things that cannot be explained? We feel them, but we can’t see them. Religion is a flag blowing in the wind. Spirituality is putting up windchimes of our own design. Each of us getting to choose how they look and what they sound like so that when the wind blows, we can experience it for ourselves in a melody that makes sense to us, that sounds good to us.
Growing up, spirituality was all tangled up with religion like the roots of two flowers planted too closely together. And when religion got yanked out, it pulled with it all my language and framework for understanding spirituality and I was left with a hole in the soil of my soul.
I’ve spent the last nearly two decades regrowing my roots. Sending out feelers into the ground all around me. Where’s the water? Where’s the nourishment? How do I feel connected and stable here?
For so long I was told I was a rose. A beautiful blossom needing the exact and perfect conditions in which to bloom and thrive, needing a gardener to carefully gatekeep the conditions around me so I would be okay.
Turns out, I’m a wildflower.
Finding my way up through the cracks in the crumbled stones and tiny pockets of earth. Sending roots through all kinds of ground, finding my connection without management. Making anywhere my home.
Growing and dying again and again. Wild on the wind. Make a wish!
American churches shouldn’t be surprised that so many of us have made our own sanctuary from the bare dirt and the sun. We have become fields of wildflowers in orange and white and pink by the side of the road. Blossoms coming up through the brambles. You find us blooming anywhere and everywhere.
There’s no need to call us lost. We aren’t wayward.
Just like I find seedlings popping up in my compost bin, so are we. Nature knows that the best soil is full of what was discarded and dead. The healthiest gardens are not in perpetual and perfect bloom.
So once again, my own backyard garden has answered my most difficult questions for me. No, I’m not weak minded for wishing for roots. I’m not discardable because I grow better outside their garden’s gate.
You cannot toss us out of the garden and then be surprised when we transform the wilderness into our sacred home.
This is an essay from the archives of my Notes app where for the last few years I’ve been writing through my deconstruction and personal healing journey but with no place to share it. I hope it finds every other wildflower out there that needs to see that you’re not alone in your longing and that there is blooming outside of the garden. If it resonates, please like it, share with with a dear friend, or send me a note in a comment. We build our fields blossom by blossom. xo-B
Thank you for supporting me in this season of transition and unveiling as I navigate putting my writing out into the world in an organized way for the first time, pull back the curtain on my heart and (hopefully) sow seeds of hope in any of you on a similar path of discovery.