On a Tuesday in December, just before Christmas, I was given last rites. 

That following Monday, my boss called me, wondering why I didn’t show up for work. She was scheduled to go on vacation, and shouldn’t I be fine by now?  

I acquiesced, just as I’d acquiesced to cooking Christmas dinner the Saturday before. In my mind, I thought returning to work so quickly after an ectopic pregnancy that resulted in emergency surgery, imperiling the lives of two people and leaving one dead, would impress on my bosses and my family that I was resilient, quick to heal, and had my priorities in line. I had left Christmas Eve Mass in tears, unable to overcome the physical and emotional pain that had suddenly overtaken my life. I couldn’t focus my eyes on emails or text messages. But somehow, I was determined to prove my value. The world would not continue without me, even for a moment. 

Six months later, drawn, burnt out, emotional, angry, and struggling to connect with reality, I took a buyout and retired, at the ripe old age of 40. I was useless, completely detached from my life, unable to find my purpose, and suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder that robbed me of happiness and memory — in that short half-year, I bought and sold a house. I started and ended a company. I watched children grow and change. 

And I remember none of it.  

And then came the garden. 

It’s more of a miniature farm, really. It has livestock, and it runs year-round, in the nearly-half-acre back yard of our Nashville home. We live well within city limits; if you walk to the end of our street, there’s a car wash and a laundromat and a city bus, and if you walk out my back door, you’ll find a fully functional, largely sustainable, mini-agricultural venture, complete with some social-media-savvy chickens, that keeps my family fed and draws us, daily, closer into harmony with God’s creation, as if it’s not out of place and just a fact of life in a mid-sized city.  

In his encyclical on the care of creation, Laudato Si, Pope Francis calls for an “ecology of daily life,” and while my situation was somewhat extreme, the Pope speaks extensively about that sort of universal interdependence of creation, not solely in regards to climate change — though that is what the encyclical is now famous, or infamous, for — but in regards to how humans have pursued progress, meaning and, most notably, technology, at the expense of “living wisely, thinking deeply, and loving generously.” 

It’s a process Pope Francis calls “rapidification”: when the acceleration of technology, coupled with an anxiety-inducing intensifying pace of life, forces humans to reorder their priorities away from what’s real and good and of God and toward this cycle of fear, greed and consumption that ultimately takes a toll on our natural environment.  

For me, “rapidification” had become part of my daily life. Up at 5, news at 6, kids at 7, calls at 8, work until 5 or 6 or 11. The day my ectopic pregnancy ruptured, in extreme pain, I got up, took a shower, got my kids ready, and sat through two conference calls, fully anticipating a full workday. Eventually, I just passed out. But I took my phone with me to the emergency room, just in case. 

A backyard garden has been a dream of mine since I was little, working in my grandfather’s garden, eating the unripe wine grapes that tasted like I imagined champagne tastes, smelling four o’clocks and fig trees and digging in the dirt. They were easily the sweetest memories of my childhood, even though he passed when I was just 6. When I read Laudato Si for the first time, I didn’t imagine arguing about international climate standards at the United Nations, I imagined Nonno’s garden and the way it felt to grow alongside the plants. Pope Francis’ words, in the closing paragraphs, echoed in my brain: “Human life,” he said, “is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbor and with the earth itself.” 

When we set out to buy a home in Nashville, we knew we wanted to be an exercise in living the edicts of Laudato Si, a way of pursuing a sort of individual environmentalism that improved the lives of our own family and community the way Pope Francis envisioned. It was environmental education, but also a way of caring for creation that didn’t involve a partisan political battle, or corporate taxation, or carbon limits, or more technology — a way to experiment with whether living a life of quiet naturalism in a bustling, loud, urban environment could help make the world a little better.  

Following some basic instructions from the University of Tennessee and the St. Kateri Center, a Catholic ecological mission, we started composting. We added a pollinator garden for bees and butterflies. We built a chicken coop, where bedding and solid waste could be recycled into compost and then fertilizer for plants, eliminating the need for most chemicals. We grew our own vegetables from heirloom and heritage seeds and used natural pest-control methods, including just letting the chickens have their way with garden bugs. We saved our onion skins and banana peels and coffee grounds, reserved water, eschewed plastic, and tended diligently to the chemical content of our soil. It became a hobby — and then an obsession. My garden tasks were penned neatly next to my work assignments in my planner, and we plotted out seasonal crops and researched preservation methods. 

We grew. A lot of food. But as I worked to put my family’s existence into better harmony with nature, something even better happened — I started to feel myself closer to God. 

What I thought I’d lost in those six months after my medical emergency was a connection to my family, to work, and to the world. But as I examined what had happened, I realized that deeper connections had been severed by years of doing work that felt less than meaningful, trading off time with my family, time with nature, and time with God for jobs that were increasingly demanding, increasingly intense, and leaving me increasingly adrift.  

I was ignoring God’s call to a deeper connection — doing everything possible to avoid it, really — and suddenly the problems Pope Francis speaks of came into stark focus, and Laudato Si’s call to a countercultural lifestyle that returns to a deeper relationship with creation, over a relationship with consumption, became a need, not merely an experiment. 

What we found in our miniature Laudato Si farm was joy. 

 My children learned where food came from, growing tiny seedlings into fresh cucumbers that they tore off the vine every morning for breakfast for a straight week (when we ran out of cucumbers, we substituted fresh tomatoes).  

We cheered on bees as they buzzed around flowers, collecting nectar pollen and fertilizing our plants. We learned to identify their individual species and that bees sometimes eat so much that they take naps in squash blossoms.  

God’s work was everywhere around us. This fragile ecosystem we were carefully maintaining was a window into creation’s symphony of detail. Each leaf, each blossom, each insect and animal working together to feed us — all so thoroughly thought out, but so easy to miss. It was humbling, too, to know so much of what we were witnessing was a thought of God so long before we ever came to be. It made the universe itself expand for us. 

We eventually grew so much food that we gave it away in pint containers and as pickles and jams and jellies. We left vegetables on neighbors’ doorsteps and handed cucumbers through fences. Our chickens, which we raised from hatchlings, give us so many eggs that we’ve become local dealers, mostly giving our loot away, since — let’s be honest — chickens don’t provide a great return on investment. It grew our spheres of connection, introduced us to neighbors, and now seems so vital to our community that next year’s plan includes a little free farmstand.  

Our top hen, Kevin, even became a social-media star.  

Pope Francis notes that it is “countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology” and that we must have “a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational program, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm.” From there, he believes that humans will naturally change our environmental future, because our relationship with creation — and its Creator — will change. 

This isn’t to say that our dolce vita is the only way to live Laudato Si. We are undoubtedly privileged to be able to take on this project. When we got down to it, it wasn’t really how big the garden was or how much it produced. It’s that we were, to use a terminally online phrase, touching grass. Letting go of technology for a little while. Enjoying food, and life, and friends, and chickens named Kevin. Enjoying what we have. Seeking joy. 

Seeking joy isn’t so much about doing anything, either. It’s just changing your outlook. Pope Francis even suggests that the mere act of saying a prayer of gratitude before meals is enough to arm ourselves against the “dynamic of dominion” we’ve taken on. It’s a practice of gratitude, of happiness, and of humility. He even uses the words of St. Thérèse of Lisieux — it is enough to practice a “little way of love.”