If you have ever planted a garden you know the optimism of green spring day shoots clearing the soil level, and the heartbreak of the first hail storm.  Never mind all the bugs, snakes and other four legged pests feasting on your sacred garden space without your permission. So it is with your mind and heart and how you have organized and planted your world. We make our decisions off the layout of our internal garden of feelings and ideas about what is true or not. You can’t know a person until you reach their internal soul garden, because that is what they value and the patterned layout of their lives.  

It seems everyone surrounds and protects their ‘soul gardens’ with a fence of ideologies, impulses, compulsions, and so forth. Lets’ call that nest of obfuscation their forest. This writer tends to compare the internet with the fabled Sherwood Forest.  In the media of internet, for every Robin Hood there are one hundred thieves, robbers, and cut throats. Getting to know your neighbors and their sense of good requires the curiosity, patience, and courage to cut through their forest of unique, often illogical and sometimes dangerous ideas before you can get permission to enter their particular garden of ‘what matters’.  More importantly If individuals don’t weed, water, and replant their soul gardens, the forest takes over and we currently live in thickly forested times.  The source of the problems of our times are probably divided between the our internal garden of values and all of our forests of ideology

Good is simple here.  First we have to weed our own life patterns and thoughts to rediscover the rich soil of what actually matters and must be tended. Our gardens inside have to grow with us and be tended for the time and stage we are in. Then we need to have to courage and curiosity to call on our neighbors and let them walk us through their protective forest of conflicting ideologies, religious misinterpretations, minor vanities, and major fears, until they show us their true garden of meaning, whatever shape it takes.  Thus begins communication and true community. From these light giving connections comes the next better democracy.