The Garden Between Us

This talk was given for Somerville College’s Choral Contemplation on 17 May 2026.

Hello and good evening. Thank you for being here for this Choral Contemplation on friendship.

I want to begin by thanking my dear friend Aoife, who connected me with Arzhia, and Arzhia for the kindness of this invitation and for the beautiful tending she has offered this space during her time here.

The title of my reflection this evening, The Garden Between Us.

The garden in question does not have sole ownership. It is not my garden. And it isn’t your garden. It is the garden between us.

A garden that comes into existence when people turn toward one another with the intention to stay and cultivate something beautiful together.

I would like us to consider what this imagery might teach us about friendship, growth, knowledge, transformation, and the kinds of worlds we create together. To consider what it means to develop the conditions for us to know another person, and to be known.

Much of my working life has been spent in ecosystems that may seem, at first glance, to have little to do with one another. In one part of my work, I spend time alongside organisations and institutions trying to create positive change in the world. They speak about systems change, structural change, root causes, and reshaping the conditions that influence how people live well. In another part of my work, I have spent years researching and designing educational programmes within Muslim communities, trying to understand how and why people search for religious knowledge and how they come to understand who they should be in the world. But whether I am sitting with institutions or individuals, I find myself returning to the same question:

What are the conditions under which something or someone is formed, and becomes?

Not the conditions under which someone simply appears to change, but those which actively cause a person or entity to enter into another way of being.

The answer, I have found, is rarely mechanical. It is usually relational. It has to do with the quality of presence, attention, care, and environment surrounding the thing trying to come into existence. That is what the garden already knows.

A garden is a living system. And living systems cannot simply be engineered into flourishing. They are complex interdependent strands that sustain one another. They respond to conditions, but not always predictably. They have their own timing, their own intelligence, their own capacity to surprise us. We can prepare the soil carefully. Choose the seeds intentionally. Water consistently. Protect from harsh weather. And still, we may be surprised by what struggles. What thrives. What arrives unexpectedly and turns out to be exactly what we needed to know. Every garden grows within larger conditions of its environment. Some climates make flourishing easier. Others make tenderness, patience, and trust more difficult to sustain.

Many of us are trying to cultivate meaningful relationships within an increasingly exhausted social world. A world shaped by speed, performance, surveillance, and division. A world in which we are encouraged to react quickly but rarely invited to remain present long enough for understanding to take root. Gardens invite us into a different understanding of growth from the one many of us have inherited.

The dominant logic of our time often understands growth as accumulation: more, faster, visible, measurable, scalable. In my own research, I have observed how even sacred forms of learning can become shaped by these logics. Religious knowledge becomes packaged, optimised, distributed efficiently. And the question subtly shifts from: Does this form people into spiritually healthy beings? to How many people can this reach?

But gardens resist this logic. Growth in a garden is often invisible for long periods of time. It happens underground, in roots quietly deepening beneath the surface. It cannot be rushed without damage. And perhaps most importantly, gardens remind us that endless accumulation is not the same thing as flourishing. A garden that is never pruned eventually exhausts itself. Soil that is never rested eventually loses its vitality. Healthy growth requires rhythm. Limits. Patience. Care.

I think friendship asks something similar of us. I don’t mean the curated and constantly visible version of friendship but the slower and more difficult kind. The kind capable of surviving seasons of uncertainty, grief, silence, distance, and change. Meaningful friendship requires tending. Everyone wants a beautiful garden, but few of us want to dedicate the time and effort needed to tend to it. And sometimes tending means pruning.

It means difficult conversations. Naming what is no longer life-giving. Releasing, with care and without bitterness, a version of the relationship that can no longer sustain either person. Trusting that what remains, tended honestly, may become stronger and truer than before. And perhaps this is true not only of friendships, but of communities, institutions, and societies too. The spaces between people are not empty spaces. They are environments in which ways of being are cultivated over time. Trust grows there. Fear grows there. Gentleness grows there. Cynicism grows there. Love grows there.

Every society cultivates something.

We are living in a time where people are lonely, overexposed, suspicious, and exhausted. We can see everything and still struggle to witness one another. And I sometimes wonder, with all the crises we are told about, whether one of the deepest crises of our time is not simply disagreement, but the erosion of the spaces between us. Spaces where people can encounter one another slowly enough to allow something beautiful to grow. To remain human with each other. Spaces where vulnerability is not immediately punished. Spaces where disagreement does not automatically become disposability. Spaces where difference does not mean the threat of danger.

In many spiritual traditions, the garden is not simply a beautiful place. It is a threshold space. A space where the boundary between the ordinary and the sacred becomes more permeable. Thresholds are often imagined as solitary experiences. A doorway crossed alone. A descent into uncertainty. A reckoning. But friendship offers another kind of threshold. One that is irreducibly shared.

We heard this earlier in the words of Rumi describing his relationship with Shams of Tabriz: “I was a dead person walking when I met Shams.” The friend was not simply an enrichment of his life. The friend became the threshold through which he passed into a fuller version of himself.

There is a concept within the Islamic tradition called suhba, companionship. The sustained presence of people who contribute to your spiritual and ethical formation simply through proximity, attention, and shared life. It is rooted in the understanding that transformation is not only informational. It is relational.

Sometimes another person helps us become capable of seeing a vista that we could not previously see alone. Across spiritual traditions, companionship often becomes not merely emotional support, but a way of approaching the sacred itself. We’ll hear it later from the choir: “As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God.” And you’ll hear it again in Ijeoma Umebinyuo’s poem about sitting with a friend in pain and “planting flowers inside words.” I have often wondered why she chooses flowers as the image. Not seeds. Flowers. Something already living. Already carrying beauty. The friend in the poem is not trying to engineer healing or force transformation. She is simply remaining present at the threshold. Holding open the possibility that life might still emerge again.

There are some forms of knowing that cannot emerge in isolation. We can acquire information alone. We can consume endless content alone. But there are other forms of knowing — about ourselves, about love, about grief, about God, about what it means to remain human, especially in the age of AI. Ways of knowing that are cultivated slowly through companionship, disagreement, witnessing, conversation, and the gentle accumulation of shared life. Those ways of knowing require presence

This chapel itself was built upon a similar conviction. A house of prayer for all people. A space where gathering across difference might allow something to emerge that none of us could arrive at entirely alone. This evening itself is a garden. A threshold space where music, silence, language, memory, and the presence of other people, in this chapel, create conditions for something living to grow between us. And perhaps friendship works similarly.

We cannot engineer intimacy or manufacture belonging. Gardens require all year care in some form or another. So, we can do what the gardener does and create the conditions for something beautiful to bloom. Return intentionally and remain attentive to what is actually happening rather than only what we hoped would happen. Hold our intentions gently enough that we can respond to what the relationship itself is asking to become.

So this is the invitation I want to leave with you this evening: To think about the people in whose company you have stood, whether briefly – a moment at bus stop, on a train ride, passing on a walk.

Or perhaps over a longer period of time — the friend who steadied you. The friend who wounded you. The friend who widened your imagination. The friend who sat beside you in silence. The friend who called you in.

What became possible for your becoming?

And think about the wider gardens we are participating in cultivating every day. The communities we are building together. The forms of attention we reward. The ways we learn to speak to one another. The conditions under which people are allowed to become and be well. Because perhaps the garden between us is never only personal. Perhaps it includes the fragile work of sustaining the social and spiritual conditions under which human beings can still encounter one another with depth, patience, humility, and care.

Perhaps that is what friendship asks of us. Care. A willingness to tend carefully to what is growing between us. To remain present long enough for roots to deepen. To trust that not all growth must be visible to be real. And to remember that we are, at best, faithful co-tenders of something that exceeds us both.