Monthly Archives: May 2015

Gardening as a political act

03 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in Nature, Yard

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purple butterfly

I’ve spent a lot of time in the garden lately—removing a tree, pruning, cleaning up, hoeing, and weeding. I must admit I feel much better about the world. When chain-sawing a tree into little pieces, it is easy to think about those people who continually call for preparations for war instead of negotiations for peace. When pruning, my thoughts focus on those who constantly reduce funds for human needs, foodstamps, Medicaid, and education, while eliminating taxes for people who already have more than enough wealth for themselves. While cleaning up, I visualize those who cater to the preferences of their multi-million dollar campaign contributors, while the ideals of public service and the general welfare decline. As I hoe and chop and hack, I release my pent-up frustrations with the proliferation of weapons and the innocent or near innocent victims of their abuse. When weeding, the confusion of immediate and temporary profit at the expense of long term environmental degradation and the increasing probability of global climate catastrophe transforms into clarity as I pull up each unwanted and undesirable weed. In the garden, the plants yield to my care and my power, and I can gradually resolve all the problems of the world.

If only.

The garden offers respite from a jungle of unresolvable tangles in the rest of the world. The work releases stress.  Mounting anger and helplessness find their targets in real-world associations, but the result can be constructive. We can exercise a degree of control over the design and cultivation of the garden, as long as we take our steps in small increments that match our limited energy and resources. Keep it small, and we can manage. The larger it gets, and the more subject to weather, pests, intruders, and other unforeseen influences, the more the garden resembles the tangled jungle beyond it. We have to learn to cooperate with the changes that come and exercise our influence with humility.

We learn that politics can shape our garden in small but meaningful ways for the future we want to enter. The garden can become a haven for birds, beneficial insects, butterflies, and the animals that need a home. The garden can match the environment, its water resources and climate-suited plants, and become a testing ground for reducing chemicals, poisons, and additives that reduce the health of the whole. The garden can preserve plants and seeds that provide genetic variety and diversity. The garden can recycle mulches, pavers and walkways, and reduce the waste that we send to the landfill. Food for the picking and beauty for the senses are at hand in the garden.

So many benefits, but none of them offer an escape from politics. Instead they offer a healthy way to reenter them. Just leave the dirt in the garden.

A license to preach

02 Saturday May 2015

Posted by in Caring, Words

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3 Owls

When does a person run out of things to say? Oh, there are plenty of times in conversations when there is a lull, no one knowing quite where to go from the last comments, but after a few moments we think of something to talk about. And there are those moments when the talk comes abruptly to a full stop, because the “last word” has been spoken on a particular topic, and the next words must either change the subject or plunge into deeper turmoil. There is usually something to be say.

When I first started to preach, at age 16, receiving a Methodist Local Preacher’s License, I couldn’t imagine not having something to say. There was a rather full Bible. There was a four thousand year history of Abraham’s children to draw from. There was my own “vast” experience as a teenager, and later young adult, and still later….  After all I had a “license” and people were willing to have me preach. To fill ten to twenty minutes of sermon time started as a challenge, but after getting started it rarely was a problem for me. For my listeners on the other hand….

After more than fifty years the question is still not one of running out of material or topics. I have no trouble filling three hours of class time in one evening session at the local community college. The question of value persists. What difference does all this talk make? Who is listening? Who is really paying attention? When do we reach the heart of the matter? Or is it so much fluff and unimportant irrelevant detail? Where is the good in all this talk? Will people recognize it when they hear it? Will they remember it?

Maya Angelou, who often had profound things to say, in well-chosen words, said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”  This is more than the “medium is the message” of McLuhan’s theme, which itself seems more valid now with all the technical options available for communication than it was in the 1960’s.

I have mostly stopped making speeches during the last eight years. In writing and editing students’ words I haven’t stopped reworking vocabulary to say things in the simplest way, eliminating passive verbs and being verbs, trying to touch emotional nerves without rubbing them raw, detecting where we have hidden the meanings rather than revealing them. I have been listening to preaching and powerful speaking and taken time to remember the many times speakers and writers have moved me in different ways with different voices. Not simply informed or entertained, but made me alive.

Parables are a part of this search for meaning beyond the words. More on this later….

Another Uninvited Intruder

01 Friday May 2015

Posted by in Forest, Learning from mistakes, Nature

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.comAt Camp Quest in 1963, I was a church camp counselor in charge of an open-sided “hogan” full of junior-age boys. I was 16. Recruiting older folks to serve as primitive camping counselors was difficult; I was recruited in the last days before the camp began. I had a lot of camping experience for a 16 year old, but I was still a green recruit. Getting ready for the night’s sleep, I had not reminded the boys to put their candy or foodstuffs into a suspended container in a tree, away from the hogan.

Campfire over and extinguished, last group walk through the dark woods to the latrine accomplished,  boys and girls separated to their own hogans, boys bedded down, lights out, quiet hour imposed first, second, and third times, we entered into what may have been my favorite part of the day—sleep time. Not to say that spending sixteen active hours with 9, 10, and 11 year-olds wasn’t fun, after a fashion. One of the older counselors, a minister in his fifties with a dozen children at home, said that the slow pace of this camp in its rustic natural setting made this week one of his favorite in the year. He had volunteered for it several years in a row. I wouldn’t have described the camp quite that way, but it was O.K.

That night I woke sometime after midnight, as I often did, and lay on my cot quietly, enjoying the soft snores of my nestlings along with the crickets, tree frogs, cicadas, and a distant whippoorwill, when I also heard some rustling under one of the boy’s cots. The moonlight shone into a corner of the hogan, so it was not difficult to see when I peeked out of my sleeping bag over the edge of my bed. The black fur was nearly invisible, of course, but the white stripe was quite obvious. The skunk evidently enjoyed the treat as it rustled its wrapper, and then moved on to another knapsack to find something equally enticing.

If my prayers with the children up to that moment had been rote, forced, uninvolved, and lame, they gained a new fervency. May none of these boys wake up. May the skunk eat its fill and leave as uneventfully as it came. May the children’s dreams all remain blissful and undisturbed. I don’t know how long I remained in that state of sanctified solicitation, but it seemed like hours. Finally, the skunk moseyed away. I added my thanks and relaxed. When the boys woke up the next morning and discovered that an invader had devoured their candy stashes, I had to tell them what had happened.

I didn’t have any trouble persuading the boys or the girls to put their secreted snacks into the tree storage container the next night. Of course that also meant they had to share what they had hidden away.