by Jasmine King
A friend of mine was supporting me through my postpartum/loss journey and sent me the practitioner program post via Instagram and I applied immediately. The opportunity to work at GPI couldn’t have come at a better time. Let’s call it healing through nostalgia. I grew up around gardens, sharing produce and having my hands in the dirt so I suppose life is coming around full circle as most good things do! It’s the ideal vocation for me and I’m so grateful the position aligned right when it did. It’s true there will be challenges because it is laborious work but the knowledge gain of learning it all from seed to harvest is a skill that can never be taken away and can be passed to others that are interested.
What else do I hope to gain?
I also hope to gain knowledge about gardening techniques to share with my doula clients who are pregnant, grieving loss, and have newborns that are interested in bringing to life a garden project of their own. Cultivating a garden is a great step to tending to something that may feel it only benefits them in the end but actually awakens something within throughout the whole process. For example, repotting in the greenhouse has been extremely meditative to me and being filled with the oxygen in there feels so refreshing. I look forward to going back each shift to see what all has grown. Within these few weeks I’ve also met a handful of like minded women who share similar values which is everything I didn’t know I needed and will surely reciprocate the same energy. I’ve found that community is everything and is the biggest reason to my joining.
