Empowered Spaces

Seven seasons in the Empowered Spaces Community Garden and Orchard continue to remind me that growth is not something you make happen. It’s something you get into relationship with.

The plant will not be rushed. No matter how badly you want it. No matter how much expertise you bring.

What moves it is being in relationship with the land. Listening deeply to what it needs, and understanding that no plant grows in isolation, it grows inside an ecosystem.

The soil teeming with life beneath it. The companion plants around it; the insects, the water, the season, the many hands that show up on a Sunday morning to tend what’s growing together.

Remove any one of those elements and the whole system feels it.

✨Healing too asks to be tended, collectively, in relationship, inside an ecosystem of care.✨

This is also why the work of healing is inseparable from the world we are living inside.

Staci K. Haines, whose work has deeply shaped mine, names this clearly: our bodies are where the political lands. Where the cost of systems designed to extract rather than sustain gets stored, in our bodies, in our nervous systems, and in the parts of us that learned to stop feeling in order to keep going.

The conditions that allow a person to heal — safety, slowness, genuine connection, being witnessed, rest, community, belonging — are the same conditions those systems work hardest to deny us.

We’re pushed to overwork, to move too fast to listen, to each other, to the world, to ourselves. Isolation is what’s left over.

Tending the conditions of healing, together, then becomes a radical act.

The garden keeps showing us this. You cannot force growth. But you can restore the ecosystem that makes it possible.

my dear friend, you don’t need to force yourself into healing. you need the conditions that make it possible.

that is what we are building at Empowered Spaces, together.

with love and solidarity,
Kelly

The body doesn’t heal in isolation.

Your nervous system learned what it knows in relationship — with people, with places, with the conditions you were handed.

Healing therefore asks the same of us: connection, context, community. This is the foundation of everything we do at Empowered Spaces. Healing isn’t a solo project.

Healing isn't asking you to be calm right now.

It's asking you to stop overriding yourself.

Because here's what calm can look like when it IS NOT actually healing:

shutting down. Going quiet. Being good at the expense of being alive. Numbing the sensation, skipping past the feeling, intellectualizing everything until the body is somewhere far away and manageable.

We are so well-trained in this.

Don't feel. Don't make it a big deal. Keep it together.

And we call that coping. Sometimes we even call it healing.

But presence — real presence — asks you to stay in contact with what's actually moving through you.

The grief. The tenderness. The rage. All of it.

Without abandoning any part of yourself.

Presence isn't calm. It's contact.

And contact — with yourself, with each other, with this world we're living in — is where healing actually begins.

my dear friend, your feelings are not the problem. They are the guide.

with love and solidarity,
Kelly

It was a cherry kind-a-day 🍒

There is so much abundance in this sweet little garden and orchard.

The Empowered Spaces Community Garden is entering its 7th season, and it remains one of the most alive things we do at Empowered Spaces.

Because it’s the most literal expression of what we believe — that healing happens in relationship. With each other. With the earth. With our community.

We grow here cooperatively. No individual plots, just shared hands and shared harvest.

Most of what we grow leaves this land and feeds neighbors across St. Louis. That’s not a side project. That’s the whole point.

And what I’ve learned over seven seasons is that the garden tends us right back. Something happens when we put our hands in the soil together. Something settles. Something opens.

If you are looking for community, we would love for you to join us. We are here to take care of one another.

Deep gratitude for volunteers from joining us today as well!