Finding My Path in the Anthropocene

Reading Laura Hall’s My Mother’s Garden in Art in the Anthropocene hit me right in the feels. It made me think about how much our lives—and our passions—are shaped by the environments we move through. In her essay, Hall talks about how her mother’s garden is this beautiful, messy mix of human care and natural chaos, a microcosm of the Anthropocene itself. It’s a place where you see the push and pull between control and surrender, and that concept deeply resonates with me as I think about my own project, The Path.

The Path is all about passion—how it shifts, evolves, and sometimes feels like a never-ending journey. And, like Hall’s garden, it’s not just about what we want to achieve; it’s about the terrain we’re forced to walk through along the way. The metaphor of a path in my work represents just that: the smooth stretches of desert where everything seems possible, the jagged mountains where you question everything, and those rare but oh-so-satisfying moments when you find yourself under the shade of palm trees, rewarded for your efforts.

What really sticks with me from Hall’s essay is how a garden doesn’t always give back what you expect. You can tend to it, water it, care for it, but nature has its own agenda. Sometimes it blooms beautifully; other times, it withers no matter how hard you try. That’s exactly how passion feels sometimes, right? You pour your heart into something, you grind, you hustle, and yet... it doesn’t always bloom the way you thought it would.

And here’s the kicker: just like in Hall’s garden, we don’t always have control over what happens to our passions. The world around us—the environment, society, our mental health—plays a huge role in shaping the path we walk. In The Path, I wanted to highlight that duality: sometimes the obstacles we face are organic, like natural challenges we can’t predict, and sometimes they’re imposed, like societal pressures or the expectations we place on ourselves.

Hall’s garden, to me, symbolizes that beautiful mess of trying to grow something meaningful in a world that’s often indifferent to your efforts. Passion is like that too. Some days, it feels like you’re in sync with the world, like the path ahead is clear and smooth, and you’re walking straight toward your goals. Other days, it feels like the mountains are too high, the desert too vast, and you wonder if you’ll ever see those palm trees in the distance. But the environment always shapes you, just as much as you try to shape it.

In the end, The Path is about embracing that unpredictability. It’s about recognizing that while we can nurture our passions, we also have to accept that the world around us will sometimes throw us curveballs. Like Hall’s mother’s garden, the path is a place of growth and struggle, and there’s beauty in both.

Citation: Hall, Laura. “My Mother’s Garden.” Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments, and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Open Humanities Press, 2015, pp. 283-292. Available at: http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Davis-Turpin_2015_Art-in-the-Anthropocene.pdf