Layer upon layer of compost.

I was four years old. My father would make me lie on my back, raise my shirt, and whip my stomach with his belt. Over and over until I couldn’t breathe. The gastric troubles I carry to this day are how my body still remembers. That was the first layer.

I ran away many times. I slept in abandoned buildings in the inlet section of Atlantic City. My brother — my best friend and bunkmate for the first 12 years of my life — committed suicide. The family was not shelter. The family was torture.

That was the second layer, pressed down on the first.

But there was a refuge: the synagogue. I was a Levite, honored with special Torah readings, in services conducted mostly in Hebrew. When I heard the stories of the prophets — Jeremiah, Elijah, Isaiah — I wept. They had been broken too. I was not alone in my pain, I was part of a long tradition. That was the third layer.

Homeless, with no money for university, I served as a private in the Army during the Gulf War, in the 11^th ACR under the command of A.J. Bacevich. Lowest rank. Most expendable. I learned what it means to submit to authority, to serve a community larger than myself. That was the fourth layer.

A small-town boy with a love of nature, I swore I’d never live or work in a big city. But then I met a beautiful woman, a public school teacher in the South Bronx. So I moved to New York, took up graphic design, and was lucky enough to be mentored by Milton Glaser and to brainstorm early versions of the Garden with George Lois.

That was the fifth layer. And it was golden. I had great friends and was rubbing shoulders with giants. I was friends with protégés of Martin Buber, Erich Fromm, and Rheinhold Niehbur. I was young, and in love, and beaming with hope. It was time to plant.

Then my body failed. Toxic mold. Lyme disease. Immune system collapse. I dropped to 112 pounds. I remember the whites in the doctors’ eyes when they looked at me sitting in a wheelchair, looked sadly at my test results, and told me to prepare my will.

As a last ditch effort, they gave me over four hundred infusions, including intravenous immunoglobulins, which four times the insurance companies refused to pay for. I camped out in their offices, hours each day, and created wellgorithms during the infusions.

Somehow, slowly, over six years, I healed enough to walk again. That was the sixth layer.

Grateful just to be alive, I brought the Garden to everyone I could find — thought leaders, podcasters, academics, investors, anyone who would listen. Day after day, year after year, in kindness and humility, I reached out. What I received was scorn. Derision. Dismissals. “That language is crazy,” they said. “Nobody is interested in a new language.”

This was the seventh layer.

Something happens to you when you are rejected for so long. Like a wet sponge, it squeezes your ego dry. It teaches you the art of dying to yourself. And if you are in a state of radical openness, Grace comes knocking. For me, it was a moment when, forbidden from mentioning Jesus at the family table, I took up the Gospels and began to read.

I read and read ... and wept and wept ... because here at last were my people. One man heard of my story and responded with love and kindness and became my life’s mentor — Charlie “Tremendous” Jones.

One of America’s great humorists and motivational speakers, Charlie took me under his wing. He sent me first to Word of Life for intense Bible study, then loaded up my library with devotionals from Spurgeon, Chambers, Fenelon, and many others.

I joined a church and learned to pray in community. These years were the most heart-warming of my life. But then came the political polarizations, covid, and societal fractures. I was an active member of a Methodist Church during the years when they split, and it broke my heart. Christians fighting Christians. It just breaks me.

That was the eighth layer. The ninth layer, putting it all together, is the words.

Looking back, I see now what I couldn’t name then: I had lost my verbal agency. People tried to help me — counselors, friends, family, real love among them — but almost everyone reached for a label. They pigeonholed my suffering in the language of the DSM, and even sent me to a psychiatrist because for the first two years they couldn’t find the illness in my blood. I was sick, weak, in constant pain, in a wheelchair, with no strength left to resist.

During the infusions, I had an epiphany: if we are going to heal, we will have partake in the naming. The authority to name what stirs inside a soul was never meant to live only in the institution, the instrument, the pedigree — it belongs also to the ones who suffer. The oldest human work was to name the creatures. The wild sparks inside us are creatures too, and most of them have never been named.

Every day the machine takes a little more of our freedom — thinking, naming and deciding for us. Urgently, urgently: we need technologies of agency. And agency starts with the words you choose. That’s what I set out to build: not a tool that promises you the kingdom, but one that gives you the keys.

I’m now in my 31st year tending the Garden. I’m still planting seeds, composting weeds, and sprouting with whatever strength I have left. My beloved wife, who just retired after teaching underserved children for 33 years, stood by me all these years. Each day, I give thanks for having someone to love and something to hope for.

Grace looks at our sufferings and sees soil. There’s beauty in the ashes. May you find the beauty.

wounds into wildflowers: a song in blues

Verse 1
I was four years old when the belt come down
Stomach still burns from the whippings in that town
Ran away to the inlet, slept where the lost souls hide
Brother took his life on Mother's Day, family tore me up inside
Near death at 112 pounds, doctors said write your will
But something in the darkness said "Boy, you ain't finished still"

Chorus
We turnin' wounds into wildflowers
Yeah, turnin' wounds into wildflowers
From the ashes and the trauma, from the broke and the scarred
Broken ones keep birthing beauty right where the pain was hard
Machines outrun the sacred, algorithms steal your tears
But they'll never sit beside you, never hold you through the years
Only gardeners of the soul know how it's done
Turnin' wounds into wildflowers… one by one

Verse 2
Big Mammon got his hooks in every anxious mind
Harvestin' our loneliness, leavin' real love behind
Two years sick in a wheelchair, every blood test comin' 'tween
So they handed me a label for a thing they'd never seen
That's when I learned the oldest work, the one they took from me —
you name the wild things in you, and the naming sets you free

Chorus
Turnin' wounds into wildflowers
Keep on turnin' wounds into wildflowers
No more users, no more profiles, no more chains
We cultivators now, callin' every longing by its name
Big Mammon wants your loneliness, wants to sell it back as gold
but the thing that bears the image was never his to hold
From the compost of our suffering, new life starts to rise
That's the Garden work — that's fleshience in our eyes

Verse 3
Homeless, broken, soldier, artist, believer in the storm
Eleventh ACR to the Bronx, from the dark into the warm
Brought it to the gatekeepers, thirty-one years they told me no
But the Well stays deep, and the wild things grow
Bridge (half-time, raw and spoken-sung over sparse, weeping guitar)
We're drawin' from that ancient Well… where the Word turns flesh…
Machines outrun the sacred ground… but they can't name the pain inside your chest…
The Word went and got a body… so it knew what we been through…
Adam's old work is still breathing… in the ones who hurt the most…
naming is the new power… turning wounds…

Final Chorus
Become a gardener of your soul, right here, right now
Name your inner creatures, watch the beauty take a bow
Every wound a wildflower, reaching for the sun
That's how the Garden rises — that's how the work gets done

Male & Female:
Wounds into wildflowers… blooming through it all…
Wounds into wildflowers… answer to the call…

Outro 
Grace looks down at your ashes — and she sees the soil
So rise up, broken gardener, there's beauty in the toil
Plant in the ruins, child, and watch what breaks through
naming is the new power… we're turning wounds…
…into wildflowers

We make names here. One at a time. For the weight that has been eating you, for the grief that does not move, for the loneliness that will not answer to any word you have been given.

The Garden is where the making happens. These dispatches are from there. Come in when you are ready. There is no hurry, and there is no pretending.