If you know what the Black Lives Memorial Garden is, and you’re not in favor, you’re probably thinking of filth. Disorder. Eyesores. You are a little bit right, but not for the reasons you think.

Rewind: 2020. The Black Lives Memorial Garden was, in my estimation, one of the only unalloyed goods to come from CHOP/CHAZ. When I think back to that summer, I see babies tear-gassed in their cribs. I see my friends suffering wounds at the hands of Seattle police that would take years to fully heal. I see Antonio Mays, Jr., the teenager from San Diego. He was shot in the head by CHOP security, to resounding silence from activists and much salivating from fascist trolls.

It’s an old story, when you think about it. Out of suffering, a seed. Swords to ploughshares. At a community song event in November or so, someone actually did present the group with the gift of a spade that had been forged from melted-down guns. This garden is lousy with metaphors. So okay, there’s the background. Police violence, autonomous zones, plants. The Seattle Parks Department alleges they conducted some community outreach concerning the garden in 2020 and 2021. They have not provided evidence of any outreach undertaken after 2021.

In the time since, two things have happened: The Black Lives Memorial Garden has hosted Juneteenth events, grieving circles, cooking lessons, pollinator appreciation days, and more. And Seattle’s homelessness crisis has deepened to a profound underworld of human misery.

Put simply, this area of Cal Anderson is gross.

You can go to Nextdoor if you’re hungry for details, or you can call it the natural result of human people with human bodies not having shelter. I’d guess folks congregate in this area because it’s got some of the city’s only public restrooms, as well as a bunch of underutilized spaces. There’s the totally empty wading pool, which I’ve never seen with water in it. There’s something called the “field house.” Sure, if you say so. Whatever the exact reason, the area around BLMG is a place where people feel (sort of) safe and (sort of) out of the way.

A shitty cauldron: The psychic wound of CHOP, the human-abject result of folks living unsheltered, a few plots of indigenous plants. For some of Seattle, BLMG became the scapegoat for everything wrong with the city.

I watch a man stabbing away at the soil, trowel in hand. He’s surrounded by police, partly for the light their flashlights provide and partly, presumably, for protection against the scattering of BLMG supporters past the north end of the caution tape. As he hacks and digs, I’m reminded of my trashiest college hookup. The same frantic finger-jabs apply. “There’s not a prize in the cervix!” I told my friends later, to peals of scandalized laughter.

There’s not a prize under this earth. Not to the city. Gardeners yell, “At least let us come and help you remove the plants!” “Let someone who knows what they’re doing help!”

We yell a lot of other things too.

“Are you proud of your work?”

“You’re soulless, dishonorable people!”

“Way to uproot indigenous plants, you colonizing fucks!”

“I hope your mom leaves you for being such a bad child!”

Try to be kind: Heckling is the language of the unheard. Try to understand: It hurts when someone destroys what you’ve spent years creating. Physically.

Someone posted the deputy mayor’s phone number and said call, so I called. It was 8:37 am. I heard children in the background, the clattering of breakfast things.

Sorry dude. I didn’t want to do city stuff this early in the morning either.

The deputy mayor claimed that the mayor’s office attempted to negotiate, but “the group” that tends the garden said no. I asked him why one small group would have the final word on something that affects the rest of us. Why weren’t the residents of Capitol Hill asked what we want? He hustled me off the phone.

For what it’s worth, the gardeners didn’t say no. They said, “We can’t meet unless you promise to stop sweeping the people who are sheltering in Cal Anderson.” And that might sound unreasonable to you, but you haven’t broken bread with those folks. You haven’t heard them mourn their loved ones, or been told that the garden saved their lives. And you may not have considered that when the City of Seattle “sweeps,” they don’t measure their success in people connected to services, or length of time a public space has stayed unoccupied. They measure it in bodies moved.

Believe me if you want, or disbelieve me. There used to be a garden. Now it’s gone.

I’d never set foot in a P-Patch. I don’t know what the P stands for. And my best friend has long since stopped asking me to water her plants when she’s out of town. Without the Black Lives Memorial Garden, I would never have learned a damn thing about indigenous plants.

Which is not the only virtuous knock-on effect the garden’s had for me. Without it, I wouldn’t have learned how to talk to strangers again. I wouldn’t have realized a long-cherished dream of acting as a personal stylist. (Seriously. I hosted a free community boutique during a Solstice party, and I swear, the clothes I fished from bins at the Goodwill Outlet came to life when the right person tried them on.) I wouldn’t have learned that the Filson dumpsters are a great source of salvaged fabric, or signed up for a Luhshootseed newsletter, or done detective work through a man’s soggy EBT documents to help him connect to a case worker from his health insurance.

Maybe I could have done these things some other way. But the fact is, I didn’t. Not until the garden.

This, to me, is city magic. The bright, unstable alchemy of different people bumping up against each other. It’s not a safe magic, because every interaction with others opens us to violence and heartbreak. But the unbidden, the unlooked-for, the un-predictable–that can bring blessings into your life.

Seattle has one less cathedral today. I hope not for forever.

Elisa Chavez has lived in Seattle for more than ten years, most of those in Capitol Hill. She is a poet who has been a Town Hall artist-in-residence and the Seattle Review of Books’ inaugural poet in residence. Her bilingual poetry project, Miss Translated, tackles identity, passing, and the things that get lost in translation.”

This post originally appeared on Medium.