Choosing the Garden

There is an image from The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

At the end of the story, after the unicorn has been hunted, pursued, wounded, killed, and somehow returned to life, we find it sitting quietly inside a garden. There is a fence around it. There is a collar around its neck and a chain connecting it to a pomegranate tree. At first glance, the image is called captivity.

Except the unicorn can leave.

The fence is low enough to escape. The chain isn’t actually securing it in a way that could hold such a powerful animal. There is nothing keeping the unicorn there except the fact that it has chosen to stay.

The unicorn isn’t captured by the garden. It chooses the garden.

That distinction feels incredibly important to me right now.

I talk about gardens often in my work. I tell people that healing is a lot like cultivating a garden from the ground up. You decide what gets planted. You decide what gets watered. You decide where the paths go. You decide what needs pruning and what needs more room to grow. Eventually, you also have to decide who gets through the gate.

Not everyone who admires your flowers knows how to tend a garden, and not everyone who wants access to you knows how to care for what you’ve cultivated. So I often tell people to ask themselves: Who is watering the flowers? And who is staying on the path you’ve outlined?

The path is the boundary.

A boundary isn’t punishment. It isn’t a wall constructed because you’ve stopped loving people. It is the path through the garden that says, This is how you can be in relationship with me without trampling what I have spent years learning how to grow.

Someone who cares about the garden doesn’t become offended that there is a path. They walk it.

From the Martyr to the Observer

I think many of us were taught, explicitly or implicitly, that goodness meant self-sacrifice. Be understanding. Give another chance. See their potential. Consider what they’ve been through. Be compassionate. Make room. Forgive.

None of those things are inherently wrong. Compassion is beautiful. Understanding another person’s humanity matters. But compassion without discernment can slowly turn into self-abandonment.

There is a phrase I use often: the universe does not want you to set yourself on fire to keep somebody else warm. And yet so many of us have been taught to call the burning love. We call it loyalty. We call it empathy. We call it patience. Sometimes we even call it spirituality.

Meanwhile, we’re standing in the middle of our own garden with a gas can in our hands wondering why nothing will grow.

There comes a point in our development when the martyr has to become the conscious observer. The observer can still love. The observer can still understand. The observer can even recognize exactly why someone behaves the way they do. But understanding something doesn’t automatically create an obligation to participate in it.

That’s the difference.

The conscious observer can say, I see you. I understand what happened to you. I understand why you learned to survive this way. And I also understand what happens to me when I allow this pattern into my life.

That isn’t cruelty. That’s consciousness.

Because awareness isn’t only the ability to understand other people. It is also the ability to observe yourself in relationship to them.

The Unicorn at the Water

Earlier in the tapestries, before the unicorn is hunted and killed, we see it at a fountain. According to medieval unicorn mythology, the unicorn’s horn had the ability to purify poisoned water. The animals gathered around the fountain could drink because the unicorn had made the water safe.

I keep returning to that image too, because there is something familiar about being the person who knows how to take what is contaminated and make meaning from it. The interpreter. The healer. The mediator. The person who can enter complexity and find the thread running through it.

But there is a danger in discovering that you can transmute something: you can begin to believe that everything you encounter is yours to transmute.

It isn’t.

Having the ability to purify the water doesn’t mean you are required to drink poison. Having the capacity to understand someone doesn’t mean you are obligated to absorb them. Having the ability to hold space doesn’t mean everything deserves space inside of you. Having medicine does not mean you owe everyone access to it.

This is where sovereignty enters the conversation.

The Hunt

The unicorn is valuable precisely because of what it is, so people pursue it.

This is another lesson I think many of us eventually encounter: being needed is not the same thing as being loved. Being desired is not the same thing as being respected. Being useful is not the same thing as being cared for.

People can want access to your wisdom, your softness, your labor, your emotional capacity, your body, your creativity, your connections, your attention, your ability to see them clearly—and still have absolutely no idea how to care for you.

The question eventually stops being, Who wants me?

It becomes, Who knows how to be in relationship with what I am?

That is an entirely different question.

The unicorn cannot be conquered through force. It fights back. And I think there is a stage of healing that looks exactly like that. You learn to fight. You learn to say no. You learn to recognize manipulation. You learn to stop chasing people who withdraw in order to make you pursue them. You learn that access to you is not an entitlement. You learn to protect the garden.

That stage is necessary, but I don’t think sovereignty ends there. Because eventually, if we are always fighting, the people who hurt us are still determining the architecture of our lives. We’re still organizing ourselves around the hunt.

True sovereignty asks another question:

What would I choose if I weren’t making my decisions in response to what hurt me?

That’s where the garden appears.

Choosing the Garden

The final unicorn isn’t running. This matters to me because freedom is often imagined as perpetual movement: nobody can catch me, nobody can contain me, nobody can need me, nobody can hurt me because I will always remain capable of leaving.

And sometimes that is freedom.

But sometimes freedom is having the ability to leave and discovering that you don’t want to.

The unicorn’s sovereignty isn’t demonstrated by escaping the garden. It’s demonstrated by the fact that escape remains possible. That’s the difference between captivity and commitment.

A cage requires you to stay. A garden gives you a reason to.

Perhaps part of maturity is learning that boundaries aren’t only about keeping people out. They’re also about creating the conditions under which we can safely let someone in. The fence around the garden doesn’t diminish what grows there; it protects the conditions that allow it to grow. The path doesn’t restrict the visitor; it teaches them how to move through something living without destroying it.

And the gate isn’t rejection. It’s discernment.

Who Is Watering the Flowers?

This is the question I keep coming back to, because once you’ve cultivated your own garden, you begin noticing something.

Some people arrive and pick flowers. Some people trample them. Some people stand outside the gate demanding entry. Some people tell you your boundaries are inconvenient because they benefited from you having none. Some people admire what you’ve built while contributing absolutely nothing to its care.

And then there are people who quietly pick up the watering can.

They notice when something needs tending. They respect the path without needing constant reminders. They don’t require you to burn the garden down so they can feel warm. They add something living to what is already alive.

Those are different relationships, and sovereignty is being able to tell the difference.

Maybe this is part of the collective shift many of us are feeling right now. Not toward isolation. Not toward hyper-independence. Not toward becoming so self-contained that nobody can reach us. But away from martyrdom. Away from proving love through suffering. Away from measuring our goodness by how much of ourselves we’re willing to sacrifice. Away from confusing being endlessly accessible with being loving.

The movement is toward conscious participation.

I choose what I tend. I choose what I feed. I choose what I allow to grow here. I choose who enters. And I pay attention to what happens after they do.

Because sovereignty isn’t simply the power to say no. It is the power to give an authentic yes.

Who Do I Choose to Be?

Maybe that’s the deeper question beneath all of this.

Not, Who do they need me to be? Not, Who will make them comfortable? Not, Who do I have to become so they won’t leave? Not even, Who do I have to become so nobody can ever hurt me again?

But:

Who do I choose to be when I am no longer abandoning myself in response to other people?

That is the movement from martyr to observer to sovereignty.

The martyr says, I will hurt so you don’t have to.

The observer says, I can see your pain without making it mine.

Sovereignty says, I decide what I cultivate from here.

And maybe eventually sovereignty becomes something softer than we expected. Maybe after fighting our way out of cages, we assume freedom must always look like an open field.

But perhaps sometimes it looks like a garden.

A garden with a fence you chose, a path you designed, flowers you cultivated, a gate you control, and people inside of it who know how to water something they did not plant.

The unicorn could leave.

That’s precisely why its staying matters.

Maybe the goal was never to become untouchable. Maybe the goal was to become so deeply rooted in ourselves that we could finally distinguish between being captured and choosing to belong.

There is a profound difference between someone building a cage around you and you building a life that you no longer feel the need to escape.

So choose your garden. Choose what grows there. Choose the paths. Choose the gate. Choose the people who know how to walk through something sacred without trampling it.

And above all, don’t abandon yourself just because someone else is cold.

You were never meant to set the garden on fire to keep them warm.