Welcome to The Peace Garden Project !
Sowing The Seeds of Peace
Garden Notes Where we've come from...where WE can go!
Where is The Peace Garden? (Everywhere!! YOU are the garden!)
But where did we start? (Many places, actually...within any heart that tends Peace).
Let's build new ones together!
Meanwhile, here's a story we hope inspires you...
Peace Garden is looking for inspiring people -- to video and showcase!
If you have an inspiring story we should cover -- please let us know!
Where is The Peace Garden? (Everywhere!! YOU are the garden!)
But where did we start? (Many places, actually...within any heart that tends Peace).
Let's build new ones together!
Meanwhile, here's a story we hope inspires you...
Peace Garden is looking for inspiring people -- to video and showcase!
If you have an inspiring story we should cover -- please let us know!
PEACE GARDEN, by Mark Mardon, Bay Area Reporter
Last week, as I contemplated my imminent departure from the SOMA location where I've worked for nearly a decade, I strolled through a neighborhood oasis — not the Stud, Powerhouse, Hole in the Wall, Eagle Tavern, or Lone Star Saloon, but the hidden-in-plain-view Howard Langton Garden, also known as SOMA Garden, a lush, lovely community open space I'd never really noticed before. It's a beautiful sight for sore eyes.
Situated South of Market, adjacent to a homeless shelter at Langton Alley and Howard Streets, the garden is accessible every day to visitors of all stripes, at no charge. The gate is open. The space flourishes with dirt paths snaking amidst all sorts shade trees, fruit trees, bamboos, shrubs, palms, tree ferns, vines, flowers, vegetables, a fountain and pond, and even beehives and chickens! Folks come here to work their plots, do tai chi and yoga, meditate, chat with friends, eat lunch, or simply inhale the flowery fragrances and ingenious arboreal designs. They no longer come to shoot up.
"Ten years ago there were a few swings, and it was basically a needle park," said my guide, Robert Ford, one of the community gardeners who helped bring about the transformation. "It was open, not fenced. It was very sketchy. It was one of the mini parks of the city and you didn't want to be here at night."
Then the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department and the since-disbanded SLUG (the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners) invited neighbors to help remake the park as a community garden, and Ford was among the first to sign up.
"A bunch of us saw such a huge need and a great opportunity," said Ford. "It was that dot-com era, really early on, and we had to make this look like a real garden right away. The land was vulnerable. There were other properties that were similar to this that got sold off.
"People really need spaces like this. There's an illness in the concrete. There's an illness when pushing plants out of your life is an acceptable way of living. But when you come here and just stop, and look at the bees we keep, or the chickens, and get on what I call chicken time, or bee time, or butterfly time, there's a bigger conversation."
As a community gardener, said Ford, "you work with a lot of people's intentions, and melding that all together is the art that makes this place what it is. Gardeners have to take the long view. They have to be patient and respectful. Gardens are about what is abiding over time. You start out doing it badly, then get better from there. We've had a lot of little tiffs over the years, but we keep creating this beauty. Actually, it keeps creating us. Something goes on here that's bigger than the little parts. It's just magic to watch. People transform."
Among those working to create the re-imagined SOMA Garden space is a gardener, now clean and sober, who used to be part of the needle scene in the old park. The creation of the gardening community helped him recover. "A whole new space blossomed in his life," said Ford. "All of us are in a kind of recovery. There's nothing in this garden, no person, who isn't in some way damaged. And that's the gift of the garden. If we were perfect we wouldn't be here."
Ford recently went through another profound transformation, transitioning out of the National Guard, where he was a chaplain's assistant. Ford speaks passionately in favor of gardening for peace:
"I think we have to throw all our efforts internally and in the world to creating and cultivating peace. . . . We're in a day when yesterday's model is dying. The Talibans of the world are dying, and it's a very shaky death. It's a very violent death. We have to be willing to be brave enough to look beyond that and say, what can we offer as a substitute? How about something like this? Can I meet my Sufi brother and my Buddhist friend, can I hold my heart open for a transsexual who is finding the courage to be herself? And still carving that new territory without judgment? That's the peace I want to cultivate with all my heart."
"This garden is a table setting," Ford concluded our walk. "You asked about people coming to the garden, and I say fine, come, the meal's ready. So show up. That's why we're here."
