I saw something the other day that really struck me. It said:

“In the 1900s our grandparents had a third place. Not home. Not work. A place in between where life breathed a little easier. It was a place like a barbershop, a local diner, or the church steps. A book club, a bridge table, or garden bench. It was a place where there weren’t screens. There wasn’t an agenda. Just regular faces and slow conversations. A place where stories were told and grief was softened. Where joy was shared and comfort given. 

It seems today like we’ve replaced all of this with doomscrolling for hours in silence and alone. Maybe we don’t need self help books. We need to find The Third Place again.”

Something about that really sits with me. I talked about it with the staff during one of our morning huddles and had everyone say what they thought their third place was. Lots of “my garden” as answers, a bench in the park and Bok Tower were others. As I think back over my life and about the idea of the third place, one memory that comes back to mind is coffee and doughnuts after church. Both growing up and today, after church, when we head over to the aptly named Social Hall, grab a donut and coffee, and sit at the typical church-room tables with friends and catch up on what has happened through the week or discuss different things going on in our lives. In the moment, you don’t realize what a difference these places make in your lives, but they really do.

And we do have plenty of places like this around us. There are beautiful parks in our area and some really fun ones for kids like Medard or Bonnet Springs. There are coffee shops and cafes, church social halls and yoga studios. But the thing is, you often see people sitting solo and on their phones in many of these places now. I think the idea of The Third Place is the idea of community, of talking and laughing, of socializing. So I encourage you to look up from your phone, engage with someone around you, and find your third place.

I’m sure many of us, as gardeners, find a Third Place in our gardens. It’s not necessarily a place filled with other people in the same way as a café or coffee shop, but it is a place to unwind, to relax, and to de-stress. And I know at our house, when we have people over, we love to use our gardens as a conversation starter. We’ll give people a tour of what we’ve been working on, whether it is our veggie garden or butterfly garden, and we’ll introduce people to our chickens and show them the bee hives. Along the way, we talk about lots of different things, thinking of old stories and memories or of something that just happened. In that way, I think the garden does really act as that place in between.

What’s your Third Place? Where do you go to find your community? Let us know!