The Earth Says Much
The land around my house – “my” land – would say much about the hand that keeps it: overgrown, a feral lawn, become host for a multitude of insects and insects that prey on insects, for weeds with flowers and weeds with leaves and grasses with heavy heads full of seed. The tamed range is filled with Cawdor wood, and every glance outside is a reminder of my failure as a suburban land steward.
The crickets, having avoided mass destruction from the whirling blade of the mower, are literally and figuratively enjoying a “hayday”, while the birds… well, the thistle plant which now stands shoulder-high on the rise outside my window, whose flowers I have watched mature from ragged buds to glorious purple crowns, have now gone to seed, and any morning - a morning such as this - I can look out and see two or three goldfinches, winged tufts of sunlight, eagerly plucking seed from the open pods.
I am sure what they don’t eat is scattering to the winds, and come spring I will have twice ten the number of plants I watch mature today: the hazard of letting go.
A week ago I returned home from a trip to manicured Prince Edward Island to find a package waiting in the mudroom. My sister has the gift of attention, which keeps her loved ones in sight all year, finding a trinket here, a book there, and assembling thoughts of you, boxing them up and sending them, like a basket of birthday cards written all at once. The package was from her. She sent me:
- The Places in Between, the story of a recent walking tour through remote central Afghanistan, by Rory Stewart. An essential view into the country and people, not through the reversed telescope of a policymaker’s ulterior motives, but in the tangible ease and strife that one step after another offers.
- Blokus, a game that has children puzzling out shapes and spaces, and engineers working out probabilities – sort of a game of Dots for two to four, in colorful pressed plastic.
- And a fiber scroll from Ten Thousand Villages, the series of shops which supports community development and local artisans worldwide. This hanging is from Viet Nam, has a ricepaper appliqué on it, and calligraphy which reads “The Earth says much / To those who listen.”
It is the widening gaze that takes it all in, and becoming the sort of generalist who would allow his garden to run to weed - in the eyes of my neighbors - has also meant becoming the sort of generalist who watches what develops, from a dry monoculture of mixed lawn grasses to a goldfinch-feeding, rodent- and rabbit-hiding, wild-turkey luring, humming buzzing crawling wildness.
What I have always admired from the Permaculture movement, is its goal of cultivating life: the intent is to invite as much life and energy into a given space as possible. What is really interesting, Bill Mollison wrote paraphrasedly, is not what happens deep within the forest, where the local ecology is well-defined, nor far out in the middle of a meadow. No, where the most interesting things occur is at the margin, the frontier, where wood meets field, where wildness meets the tamed, where Cawdor Wood stands at Cawdor gate, where a thistle, which I have been taught to hate, stands lending its colors and its seed to every wind.
I happen to like goldenrod, too.
Maybe it is because I have no allergy to the unbridled surge of life that my yard is so full of all kinds of life, little of immediate use to humans. Or maybe I am misdirected or dissolute. I guess we choose: you will say “The Earth Says Much” or “The Earth Must Listen”… my choice clear.