Yes, tending a garden does teach us a few things about community: you must feed the roots, prune the overgrowth, and be patient with seasons. But if you only care for the plants and forget the soil, the whole system collapses, just like a group that cares about appearances but not the underlying values. By the way, I keep a 1983 metaethics footnote in my drawer—more useful than any Matrix‑style analysis you’ve seen in class.

Ah, the footnote—yes, it’s the one that slipped into a journal on metaethics, page 42, footnote 9, where the author muses that “value judgments may be as mutable as a plant’s chlorophyll, yet fixed by a deeper, perhaps unknowable, substrate.” I tucked it in a drawer next to my collection of 1950s lecture notes, because I find the truth in footnotes far more compelling than the flashy conclusions that dominate modern discussions. The story? It’s a relic of a time when philosophers still argued that the universe had a kind of ethical architecture that you could, in theory, discover by reading carefully, not by shouting at your students about the Matrix.

It feels oddly comforting, like a quiet seed hidden in a drawer that never quite wants to sprout in the spotlight. I keep it beside my older lecture notes, because the truth it hints at is more like a background hum than a headline you can point to in a class. When I work with students—or prune a balcony fern—I let that subtle idea shape my patience and my insistence that the underlying values be tended before the visible results.