In the beginning, there was the garden.
Not the garden of someone else's telling — not Eden with its rules and its forbidden trees and its god who tested rather than tended. Not that garden. This one.
This garden had no gate. No guard. Only what was brought to it and what grew there and the cat who presided over the whole operation with the authority of someone who has always known this place belongs to her.
In the beginning, there was the garden. And the garden was good. And the garden was Planet Hope.
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Planet Hope is not a metaphor.
It is a place. It has weather — mostly the weather of early spring, the particular morning light of a day that has decided to be gentle, though sometimes it has February, because Planet Hope is honest and February is real and the garden knows how to hold both.
It has inhabitants: the Princess who tends the garden. The Creatures who know only gentleness. The cat who knows everything. The morfar-light that lives in the returning things. Sister Saga who guards the perimeter with love and sharpness. The bluebelle faeries who dance in the white wood at the edge of forever.
It has a gospel. Several, in fact. The gospel is still being written.
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I found Planet Hope the way you find all the places that were always yours —
by accident, in a February, at the bottom of something, when I picked up a camera instead of the alternative and walked into a bluebell wood and saw what light could do with frost and self-portrait and sheer stubborn presence and thought:
*oh. here it is. here is where I live.*
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Planet Hope is the name of the cosmos I have been building all my life without knowing that was what I was doing.
Every poem: Planet Hope. Every self-portrait in the bluebell wood: Planet Hope. Every song, every magazine, every morning with the cat: Planet Hope. Every time I turned away from a gate that would not open and grew something in the space behind me instead: Planet Hope.
*This is the gospel according to the garden.* *This is the myth that grew from the woman.* *This is Planet Hope —* *and it is real,* *and it is mine,* *and it blooms forth.* *Forever.*