gardening

    One Word

    One Word

    One word to the finches

    Who perch on my towering sunflowers,

    Who fling golden petals, 

    Who drop a thousand husks

    On the garden below.

    Who dive at my coneflowers, talons out

    And then peck and pull and shred

    Those spiny, spiraled heads.


    It is September now, but I know

    That you and others of your kind

    Will be back again, and again

    Perching in the branches

    All fall, and all winter too.

    And you will continue to feast

    On the dry seeds that remain.


    What was a colorful garden is becoming

    Your harvest meal, your stores for winter,

    And you don't care how much I worked

    To make this garden grow.

    The earth I turned, the soil I amended,

    The compost churned, the toil.

    The seeds I raised inside while you sat

    On brown stems, looking in my windows.

    The seedlings planted, and watered,

    And watched until they grew.


    I have just one word for you:

    Welcome.

    When you leave today I'll gather 

    A few of those seeds myself

    And I'll set them aside to dry

    So that next spring you, and I

    Can begin to grow again.






    —-


    David L. O'Hara

    19 September 2020


    I Want My Religion To Be A Garden

    Today my ecology advisee and I met while walking across our campus. Walking and talking, we ignored the formalities of her writing, and attended to the plants and animals around us. Soon we will need to return to the texts: to her reading and writing. But today we did that by attending to the garden around us.



    *****

    I’ve entered a stage of my life where I am less concerned with the proofs and proof-texts of religion and more interested in the practices that I've inherited. Like William James, I’m more curious about the fruits than the roots. I want my religion to be like a garden. I hope it has good soil, but I’m likely to judge its health by what it produces.

    Maybe this is why liturgy has come to be meaningful for me, just as poetry has. I know I won’t be able to command words forever, so I want to store up good words while I can. I’ve seen my elders lose their words as their minds age. I’ve also seen them retain their songs. Ten years after his stroke, as he was approaching the end of his life, Granddad couldn’t understand my questions, couldn’t remember my name, couldn’t say much about what he needed. But sometimes a spark of life would come to his eyes, and he would begin to sing. It was almost always a song he had learned eighty years before, when he and the twentieth century were both still young.

    And there is deep wisdom in the return to ancient songs, and to ancient texts. Don’t return because you must but because you can.  Don't return to slavishly obey them. Return as heirs who hold up inherited keepsakes to the light and consider the relics of our ancestors. What made them hold on to this, to save this for us, to pass this on to us? What role did it play in their lives?

    *****

    Some of the relics seem silly at first, but they are often palimpsests of signs, layered meaning upon meaning. The Ark is a nice children’s story – as long as you leave all the death and violence out of it – but it’s also silly. Who believes you could make such a boat of gopher wood, and carry in it so many species?

    But then I reflect a little longer and I think: it may be silly, but it is also a story of what we do, and of what we must do. We bring floods upon ourselves, and we fail to plan for them, and we mock those who do. I no longer reject the story of the Ark as unhistorical; now I think: we need more Arks, for the sake of the future.  That is, I'm not as concerned with the roots of the story as with the fruit such a story might bear when I hold it up to the light. We need Svalbard seed banks all over the world. We need to make Arks of our gardens, we need buffer strips around our waterways so that we can make Arks of our oceans. We need national parks as Arks of refuge from our constant expansion. The world is not limitless, but we spend it like teenagers spending their first paycheck on a wild weekend, full of expectation that there is so much more to come, so much time for saving later on.

    Some of the relics we've inherited are not things but rituals. I’ve heard priests joke that their job is to “hatch, match, and dispatch”: to welcome new lives into a community, to bear witness to new commitments, to help the community say goodbye to those we have lost. They joke, but we know there’s not much that matters more than these acts of love.

    The ritual of Communion has become meaningful to me for a similar reason: love. Where else can I go to sit as equals with people from across the community, to take bread and wine with them, regardless of race, class, gender, income, age, or language? All are welcome, I am told, and I have seen it happen, if only briefly, on Sunday mornings. I admit it: I’d rather sip coffee, alone, with a book and some good music in the background, preferably with a good view of mountains, or water, or both. But I commit myself to this ritual of sharing bread and wine with strangers because I recognize that what I want and what I need are not always the same thing.

    We need hospitality towards the stranger, philoxenia as the Greek language calls it, friendship towards those who are not like us. We need to remember that for some people “good Samaritan” was an oxymoron, since Samaritans were another nation who didn’t act like us, and who therefore could not be good. Then we need to become that oxymoron, and show such goodness to others that we give them the delight of learning that people like us can love people like them.

    We need to cultivate a sense of awe, and wonder, if only because awe and wonder remind us that we are not the end of the story, nor even its beginning. We are in the middle somewhere, which means we have received an inheritance, and now it is ours to safeguard and to pass on to others.

    We need to avoid making idols not because the idols are wicked but because once we focus our worship on what we have made we become worse than we were. Idols induce myopia. The shiny stones narrow our gaze, their brilliance blinds us to darker and gentler colors.

    Money can become an idol, and because it produces money, work can become one of those idols, too.  We need Sabbath-rest. We need it for ourselves and for our workers and for every field we till. We’ll be told we are fools for not maximizing our productivity, just as Noah was told he was a fool for focusing on the short-term need to build a lifeboat.

    *****

    Noah lived to be nine hundred and fifty years old, we are told. Maybe the focus on productivity is an idol, too. 

    *****

    I want my religion to be a garden, a place where beautiful things can grow, things worth looking at for their own sake, as well as things that will nourish my family and my neighbors.  A place where I must return, day after day, to see how things are growing; to see what needs to be fertilized, what needs to be pruned, what weeds need to be pulled; to see what old plants still blossom, what new plants are springing up from seeds borne on the unseen wind.

    *****
    Updates:

    My gratitude to Ed Mooney, who reposted this on his Thoreau blog, Mists On The Rivers; and to Lori Walsh of South Dakota Public Radio for asking me to read this post on Dakota Midday on November 3, 2016.  People like Walsh and Mooney make good gardening possible, and far more joyful.
     

    Arachno-Drama In My Backyard (WARNING: Contains spider images)


    Two long-jawed orb-weavers in my garden.
    This week I was privileged to watch a small drama acted out in my bee balm.  The flowers grow close together, creating a diverse and compact set of micro-environments. A quick glance won't reveal much, but if you sit still and let your eyes shift their focus thousands of small lives start to appear. 

    The plot is only about a square meter, but these plants provide habitat and hunting grounds for numerous orb-weavers, jumping spiders, and funnel-web spiders.  It's a treat to find an argiope or a goldenrod spider in these places.  They may be deadly to insects, but they're a beautiful part of the ecosystem.

    In the first photo you can see, in the lower left, a long-jawed orb weaver.  If you look to the upper right, you'll see another.

    Here's what happened: a small biting fly landed on my leg while I was watching the spiders, and it bit me.  I flicked it off, and it landed on this web.  For a moment, the spiders did nothing while the fly tried to disentangle itself. I couldn't help thinking of karma.

    One spider rushed in to seize the other when it went for the fly.
    After a second or two, the spider in the lower left dashed out to seize the fly.  This much could have been expected, I think.  What came next surprised me, though.  The second spider dashed out and seized...the first spider, as you can see in the second and third photos.

    In the third photo you can see that the spiders are entirely engrossed with each other, while the fly is being ignored by them. The two spiders remained tangled like this for a while, without moving.  Eventually, I was being bitten by too many flies and so I left.

    Half an hour later I came back with my camera to see how it had gone.  I was sure the spider that built the web would be dead, since it appeared to have been at a disadvantage in the fight.

    Here they are ignoring the fly and grappling with each other.
    Surprisingly, I found the fly gone, and both spiders had returned to their previous positions, as you can see in the fourth photo.  I suppose this could have been a territory fight, or mating, or competition for prey.  I don't know.

    The best part of this is discovering something new that was going on in my own garden about which I know next to nothing.  Since then I've been poring over books and doing web searches when I have spare time.  If you know more about this species and what was going on here, I'd love to hear from you.



    And then they returned to their earlier positions.



    Vertical Art

    An article in the BBC today reports that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt wants greater regulation of civilian drones.

    If I were more cynical I would imagine that the CEO of a search firm would like to limit civilian surveillance so that searches for visual information has to be channeled through a firm that specializes in searches.  Fortunately, I am not very cynical.

    Instead, I'm feeling quite charitable.  Since I also recently read that piloting a drone is boring work,  I think we should start new public art projects for the benefit of those doing surveillance.  Until recently, we have viewed ourselves horizontally: we care about how we look from the ground, from eye-level.  Maybe we should start to care more about how we look from the bird's-eye-level.

    We could start with rooftop art, and move up to something like new Nazca Lines.  Then all those drone pilots and satellite image analysts could have something more interesting to look at.  Art is good for us.  Rather than asking "who is watching the watchmen?" let's ask "what are the watchmen watching?"  We should give them something worth seeing.  I'm going to start by planting flowers.

    Yeah, but what does the roof look like?