Beauty and Silence
When I was young, there was a small sign that hung next to the bay window that overlooked the backyard. It read, “How beautiful the silence of growing things.” Now, nearly three decades and three thousand miles from that place, I see the verdant green of new shoots on plants I put into the ground last year. I see the slow and enduring cycle of the natural world open to the light of summer. I see…a rainbow unicorn jump all over this keyboard as the laptop screen is forcefully closed by the small hands of a clumsy yet determined toddler.
These days are a reminder that silence, while essential in its own right, is not required for or characteristic of growing things. What we might take for silence is actually the fundamental - the lowest and most prominent pitch upon which the harmony of nature unfolds. Our task continues to be finding signal amidst a cacophonic information landscape. Perhaps if we open our ears and eyes to the peace of wild things we can come to rest in something not quite silent, but beautiful.
A World Below
In the dark rich earth there is a world that often gets overlooked, trodden down, and covered up.
On an early Spring weekend in Portland, I had the good fortune of fine weather to begin excavating the backyard on a piece of dirt that will make a fine garden. Covered in leaves, weeds, and crab grass, what was once an ordered and tended plot of land had been turned by the hands of time into a neglected space. Nature was reclaiming that which no longer held human attention, and rightly so.
With trowel, spade, shovel, and rake the work of uncovering began. With machines powered by dinosaur remains, edges were drawn and a patch of earth was tilled. Across this not-so-vast territory it is easy to observe small animals - birds, squirrels, an occasional cat, and the lion/fox/bear/sometimes-dog Mack traverse and explore. But unless you dig down, and pay attention to what comes up, you would never see the entrance to the world below. Spiders, slugs, snails, worms, and ants infuse the soil. They create their own highways and byways, establishing an ancient symbiosis with the roots and the plants that grow out of the earth. Harder to see but just as important are the relationships of fungi with the rhizosphere root networks that inform the ecosystem from the ground up.
It is beautifully simple and wonderfully complex at the same time: everything is connected.
Taking account of how much life exists in some handfuls of dirt was a great reminder about how woven the wellbeing of the water, the soil, and the inhabitants of earth are. Spending time with the soil made it clear to me that it is not possible to spray chemicals of any kind, especially those that kill “weeds” without devastating consequences to the entire chain. One telling example worth mentioning is the decline of the western Monarch butterfly, whose population has been estimated to be 99% reduced since the 1980s.
BJ Palmer, the developer of chiropractic, made note of the potential for impact we can have with our thoughts, words, and actions. I intend to use mine well.
“We never know how far-reaching something we may think, say, or do today will effect the lives of millions tomorrow.”
From the Wisdom of Pine Cones
Along the southern reaches of the Jersey shore, maritime forests of pine and oak grow strong in the sandy soil. Owing to the influence of fire and humanity, the predominant species here is pitch pine (Pinus rigida). The cones of this tree have adapted so that they will open only in response to extreme heat. The natural, necessary, and repetitive process of wildfire both destroys and renews the resources of this land.
At the close of 2018, I returned once again to the forests and the land where I grew as a sapling. The opportunity to spend time with my family, to revisit the well-trod paths of my youth, to hold congress with my favorite groves, and to feel the the brisk south wind along the shore, as always, was beautiful and insightful. So much has changed, yet roots remember.
If left undisturbed, clearings made by fire or people in the forest will become wooded again. In ecology, the process of succession is a slow, orderly sequence of changes in which one community of plants and animals will replace each previous community until a climax community emerges. In the Pine Barrens it takes 100-200 years for an open field to become a mature forest.
And eventually it will burn.
The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus related the kosmos to “an everliving fire; kindling in measures and being quenched in measures”. The world, like the beings that inhabit it, is constantly in a state of flux. “Changing, they stay the same”.
In my own life, especially in 2018, the sequence of changes I experienced did not seem slow or orderly. It became apparent to me that sometimes we, too, are exposed to the rapid and wild fire of transformation. In time, the flora and fauna of our inner and outer Erlebnis will change, creating and being created by the emerging landscape of Life. In his meditation on trees, Herman Hesse channels:
”A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life...I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail”.
As with trees, we have an elemental contract with earth and water, to breathe the air and to be tempered by fire. Like the pitch pine, a new cycle begins with a kernel in ash and ember. May you kindle abundance in this new year.
