All Miracles Are Created Equal

Spring - Week 23 - On the Garden We Never Left

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul

The city never sleeps, they say, but neither does the wild. I'm visiting NYC this week, and already missing the mountains I left behind. Those quiet peaks that rise without apology, where wildness spreads uninterrupted across the vast expanse. Here, everything feels compressed, urgent, layered. I'm trying not to fight it, this urban immersion, but instead find what the city offers in return.

It's been nearly a decade since I was last here alone, since Colorado claimed me, and everything feels intensified. The sounds sharper, the pace more relentless. But I've been practicing the art of deeper looking, of quieter attention. Why should the city be any different in asking for that same patience?

And so, here in the concrete arteries of New York, where sirens wail their urban lullabies and street cleaning trucks rumble through the pre-dawn darkness, I'm paying extra attention. Observing more closely, and to my delight, I see that inspite of it all, nature is staging a quiet revolution here. Reclaiming territory one seed, one root, one determined tendril at a time.

From my hotel window, the symphony of chaos plays its familiar tune. Horns honking in frustrated conversation, the mechanical whir of drilling in the street right outside my window, the persistent beep of trucks reversing. This is the soundtrack of human dominion, the audio track of a species that paved over paradise and called it progress. Yet beneath this cacophony, if you listen closely enough, you can hear something else: the whispered persistence of the natural world we thought we left behind.

It strikes me how we've created our own need for decoration in these spaces, but also how we're answering that call. Graffiti blooms across building sides here like urban wildflowers. Human creativity attempting to fill voids or simply celebrate the surfaces we have. We spray-paint murals where morning glories once climbed, tag walls where ivy would have traced its green signatures. But we're also planting towering magenta-colored hollyhocks along bike paths. Cottage garden flowers brightening the East River Bikeway at Allen and Delancey, their old-fashioned blooms a delightful surprise against the urban backdrop. Perhaps this impulse to mark and beautify our constructed places speaks to something deeper. An innate desire to restore what was lost, to invite back the beauty we displaced when we built our concrete world.

It's this same tension between displacement and restoration that becomes visible everywhere once you start looking. A choreography that has been playing out across this landscape for generations. The ride from the airport offers glimpses of this eternal dance between human intention and nature's persistence. Driving past Calvary Cemetery, I watch endless rolling tombstones bank one side of the expressway, a city of the dead sprawling before the Manhattan skyline. Here, ancient trees by NYC standards stand sentinel over three million souls. Their branches house birds whose songs compete with the hum of traffic. The city's own requiem. The headstones stretch out far beyond my sight, gray monuments emerging from the lingering fog of afternoon thunderstorms. In this curated landscape of grief, nature has been welcomed as a necessary partner in the ritual of remembrance.

But it's in the unplanned moments that nature's true character reveals itself in the city. Ivy circling a lamppost, small trees sprouting from fire escapes in impossible defiance of gravity, moss painting brick walls in soft green watercolors, and high atop a disused chimney pot, weeds have somehow found purchase. Their green persistence visible against the sky like a flag of botanical rebellion. How did those seeds arrive at such an unlikely address? Perhaps carried by wind, or deposited by a bird who understood nothing of human property. The weeds grow there now, roots somehow finding opportunity in the impossible, their very existence a testament to life's stubborn refusal to accept boundaries.

Yet there's another layer to this story, the deliberate collaborations, the spaces where humans have actively invited the wildness back in. Stumbling upon M'Finda Kalunga Garden, I find myself in an unexpected pocket of abundance. Here, beneath a thick, lush canopy blocking out the skyline, giant ostrich ferns unfurl their ancient fronds alongside hostas that would never survive in my dry Colorado soil. A catbird hops through the leaf litter, finding food in this carefully cultivated fairyland that has been decades in the making.

These community gardens reveal something profound about the city's relationship with nature. Spaces where the human impulse to nurture and grow has created refuges that feel both wild and intentional. M'Finda Kalunga stretches nearly a city block, born from the radical act of neighbors deciding that beauty could grow where despair once flourished. Proving, if you look for it, you discover the city is full of collaboration, small victories where people and plants work together to create something neither could achieve alone.

And here's what the mountains never taught me: that beauty can require communion.

In Colorado, I learned to find wonder in solitude. A lone peak against the sky, the private meditation of a sunrise witnessed by one. The mountains became more essential to me as I've grown increasingly weary of humanity. In recent years, I've found people difficult in ways that feel both personal and planetary. The noise we make, the way we complicate simple things, our endless capacity for discord and destruction. Mountains don't argue. They taught me self-reliance, showed me how to be complete in the vastness of my own small space.

But the city operates by different rules entirely. Here, beauty is almost always collaborative, and in these last days I've been forced to witness what happens when humans somehow create something transcendent altogether. Where the mountains offer refuge from human complexity, the city insists on showing me beauty that emerges from the human chaos I've been trying to escape.

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Walking through any place, even the city, becomes an exercise in finding wonder if you adjust your vision correctly. Just last week, back home in Boulder, witnessing an elderly woman running her hands through tall grass growing wild along the sidewalk, I saw someone who understood this secret language of urban nature. Her fingers moved through those stalks with the tenderness of prayer, recognizing beauty in what our municipal department would classify as a maintenance issue.

And then there was the little boy, shrieking with pure joy as a ladybug from a neighbor's yard tickled across his palm. In that moment, he was thrilled by the simple gift of a tiny beetle choosing to pause on his skin.

All miracles are created equal. The weeds defiant in their chimney pot throne, a child's palm becoming a landing pad for awe - each carrying the same essential magic. The smallest can hold the greatest truth: that beauty is everywhere.

This is nature's true genius in urban spaces: not just its ability to survive, but its power to surprise us with moments of connection we thought we'd lost forever. Every dandelion pushing through sidewalk cracks, every brave bird circling between skyscrapers become ambassadors from the world we never truly tamed. Only temporarily displaced, and thankfully increasingly welcomed back.

These urban survivors teach us that home can be made anywhere, that beauty insists on existing in the most unlikely places, and that life, given the smallest opening, will find a way to flourish. Even the way downpour raindrops bounce off the pavement like scattered pearls becomes part of this lesson, water finding its own way to dance in the city.

But perhaps most revelatory of all is what the city has taught me this week about beauty itself: that some of its most transcendent forms emerge not from solitude, but from partnership. The community gardens where neighbors tend shared dreams, the careful placement of hollyhocks along bike paths, even the graffiti. They all speak to beauty born from human collaboration with the persistent wild.

So in the end we come to understand that the wilderness cannot be permanently erased from any landscape, including the human heart. Every weed, every unexpected bird song, every moment of botanical wonder reminds us that miracles continue. And perhaps we never really left the garden. We just forgot that sometimes the most beautiful ones are the ones we tend together.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let's experience nature's gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane