Hi, I'm Jen — a gardener, a prairie chaplain, and a connector of unlikely things. I've spent most of my life at the edges. The thresholds where things are ending and something else hasn't quite begun yet.
My relationship with the natural world began with longing. Severe asthma kept me inside as a child while the world bloomed without me. Better medicines changed that.
Suddenly there were lawns thick with clover, butterflies within reach, my dad walking me through the woods naming every tree like an old friend. A semester in England and Wales pressing wildflowers. Prairie hikes where the landscape opened into something vast. And eventually my own native garden, tended season by season, failure by failure, slow wonder by slow wonder.
There is an intimacy in that kind of knowing. You don’t just observe a plant. You come to recognize it the way you recognize a loved one’s face. Once you see one thread like that, you start seeing them everywhere.
In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer
That has always felt true to me. The native garden is not where I go to find metaphors. It is where I am held. Where I return when the ground gives way. Where, somehow, I am known.
a few things about me
I hold an MDiv and lead Prairie Sky Counseling Center — where, much like here, I get to help people feel welcome to be fully themselves: joys, griefs, awkward pauses, and all.
I’ve led retreats, workshops, and community rituals, mostly at the edges of things.
I collect things without meaning to — plant names, dead bugs, stones, other people’s stories — and eventually they all turn out to be part of the same thread.
My garden keeps me humble. The rabbits win more often than I’d like.
My dad gave me many things. I’m most grateful for his humor.
why i’m here
The despair of the world is real. So is the beauty. Most days I don’t try to choose. I just keep tending both, cutting back what’s dying every fall, and finding, every spring without fail, the green already pushing up beneath it.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that she taught her daughters to garden “so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.” I think about that line when I’m out in mine. The earth isn’t a metaphor for me. It’s a relationship. One that holds me when little else can.
There is room for you here, too, in the meadow between.
