The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

Getting your hands dirty finds answers

There's something about gardens that makes big questions feel smaller and more answerable at the same time. When you're kneeling in the dirt, pulling weeds or planting seeds, you're not performing spirituality—you're just doing the work. Maybe that's why this hits different from a lot of religious talk. You can't fake your way through a garden. The soil either has what plants need or it doesn't. Your effort either shows up in growth or it doesn't.

The "digging" part is key. Shaw isn't talking about passive contemplation on a park bench. He means actual searching, the kind where you get your hands dirty and discover things as you work. A garden teaches you about cycles, patience, failure, and the strange fact that death feeds life. You plant a seed and it dies to become something else entirely. You learn that control is limited—you can prepare conditions, but you can't force the outcome. Those aren't religious lessons exactly, but they're the kind of truths that tend to crack people open.

What makes this resonate now is how many of us are searching for meaning in abstractions: scrolling, thinking, theorizing. A garden forces you to show up, pay attention, and accept that some things take time. Whether you call that God or just the real world finally getting your attention, there's something honest about it.