Earth Day

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
― Wendell Berry

Despite my enormous fortune, I would be lying if I said this past year was anything but enormously difficult. From cancelations that led to disappointments and distance to my parents’ loss in Hurricane Laura, from the staggering death toll of Covid 19 to the unconscionable and incessant toll of racist and Republican brutality, from the hundreds of days of “school” in distance learning to the relentless constancy of cook/clean/feed/console/decide/guide/repeat, I am running on fumes. Everyone I know is.

One friend who I’ve not seen for at least a year pulled up alongside me in traffic today. We rolled down our windows at a red light, delighted to see each other and yet stunned by our mutual exhaustion. Therapy, severe eczema, glistening eyes, warm smiles! Who knew so much could be shared in seconds at a stop light?

Back home, I began baking pies, one for a dear friend my age who just endured her first round of chemo. Her children are the same ages as Jack and Ol. My friend is effusive and vibrant. She is lustrous. She said pie sounded good, and so I got busy.

Meanwhile, after two days of school, Jack was home once more. He and I helped Mom and Dad move a few heavy items, and I kept my fingers crossed that Tom could break from Zoom long enough to get the pie out of the oven while we were out.

Home again, I found that one of my beloved trio of housekeepers got good news yesterday: she and her family were granted asylum here after being terrorized out of life in El Salvador. They had received videos, multiple videos, with pictures of each member of the family, identified, graphically threatened. I hugged her and saw more glistening eyes, these of gratitude for her family’s safety, yes, but also of profound exhaustion born of months and months of fear and uncertainty. I tucked a note and some money in her pocket, hoping it might cover a bit of celebration tonight.

On the way to pick Oliver up, I delivered my friend’s pie. She is beautiful as ever, but I have never seen her look so deeply fatigued, surely a fatigue also born of months of uncertainty and fear and that cautious hope that feels both essential and risky. We hugged so tightly, twice, and it almost felt criminal in this time of distance. But it also felt right, and I only hope the pie tastes good to her.

I, too, am tired. My heartbreak over this country, my worry for my friends and family, my sense of profound dislocation from self. It’s been a lot. It continues to be a lot.

One thing that holds me straight and strong though remains nature. My yard and the many tiny ecosystems it nurtures. The birds and squirrels who sing and chase and eat in picky fashion through the buffet of options I leave for them once or twice daily. The decomposing leaves, the perennials budding anew, the stubborn hope that is a garden shrugging off winter and throwing its shoulders back proudly in the advent of spring.

My Nanny always said that you could bury your troubles in the soil. Yes, you can do that. But I have found the process of burying to be even more profoundly healing and helpful than the entombing. And perhaps, probably, that’s what Nanny meant all along. I suspect that’s why my parents have always found gardening so fulfilling; you focus and give and plow and sow and then after a long while, or seemingly suddenly, you are rewarded with a clearer mind and a bounty that only nature can generate.

I struggle to relax. I always have. I am an anxious soul for whom action is often liberating, at least momentarily. Productivity, accomplishment, giving, growing. These things heal me and yet these are the very things I have found so horribly elusive since Covid struck. When you’re never alone, the opportunities to sink into flow, the way one does when hoeing and spading and weeding and amending, become the rarest of birds. For me, the lack of flow has been the more painful struggle this year.

And so, spring is such a balm. New growth takes time, and you must patiently, carefully watch. You must listen for the quiet tune. Each day I visit my gardens. I thank the worms, I exclaim over every new bud, leaf, shoot, speck of green promise. I send whispers on the wind to the monarchs and pollinators that the milkweed and Joe Pye and bee balm are all growing as quickly and mightily as they can. The penstemon and anemones and forget-me-nots are waiting. The Columbines are taking over again, the raspberries are betting the blackberries that this year they’ll claim more square footage. The irises have gone insane, as have the hellebores. It’s flora-fauna mayhem out there, and I delight in it.

Our county has banned Weed-and-Feed, much to Tom’s chagrin and much to be absolute satisfaction. RoundUp and Sevin should go the way of napalm, in my opinion. Let’s let nature do its thing; she’s only trying to keep us all healthy and well.

Tomorrow, on Earth Day, I beseech you to say thanks to the green spaces you see. Plant something or perhaps pick up some litter or pull some weeds. Listen to the birds and the insects, leave a little extra seed for the damn squirrels who really are so dear if you get past their voracious, crafty ways. Breathe deeply where you can, when you can. If we’ve not learned this past year that life is short and precious, well, force be with you. It is both, and we need to live well but also live for future generations.

Tomorrow, on Earth Day, Tom and I are making official our ownership of 72 acres in West Virginia. I am beside myself with joy and gratitude. With thrill over a truly magnificent parcel of land that I can tend and love, that my children can run across with unbridled freedom, that my family and friends can use as a respite of the sort only big nature can provide. It will be an honor to love and protect this land and to let it hold and heal us as we make our way back to ourselves and each other after such a hard time.

”Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” -Rachel Carson

Black Lives Matter.
No Justice, No Peace.
Know Justice, Know Peace.

EARTH DAY

Today marks the 44th annual Earth Day. The first, April 22, 1970, came eight years after the publication of Rachel Carson's epic work, Silent Spring, and just 14 months after the horrific oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel; at that time, it was the largest oil spill ever in America and today ranks third behind the Exxon Valdez (1989) and Deepwater Horizon (2010) disasters. On the first Earth Day, nearly 20 million Americans protested on behalf of a cleaner world. As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency was founded and the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts were passed. It's hard to imagine such bipartisan support for our world today.

In fact, many in the Republican camp -including, of course, the Tea Party- continue to espouse the ridiculous and erroneous notion that climate change is a hoax, that there is insufficient scientific evidence to suggest that human involvement, in the forms of harmful emissions, industrial/factory farming, misuse/overuse of pesticides, and so forth, is in any way culpable. This is rubbish.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released its most dire report to date, stating that unless we take the threat of climate change seriously and act NOW, our climate may be irreversibly damaged. Cannot.be.fixed. Why more people aren't taking this more seriously is beyond me. It's depressing beyond belief, shortsighted in such a hideous way.

If people were told that eating apples increased their risk of dying young by even 5%, I bet most people would hedge their bets and swear off apples. The likelihood of climate change decisively damning our world if we do not act right now is well above 5%, so why aren't we doing anything? Really, I don't understand.

Our oceans are becoming more acidic at speed-of-light rates: marine life can't stomach the change in pH; coral reefs are dying; the waters can't absorb as much CO2 as they once could. Our glaciers and ice caps are melting at equally terrifying rates. It goes on and on.

We are more than 7 billion people asking too much of our Earth. We pillage the land, overfish the seas, pollute our water sources and soil with chemicals and waste, throw trash everywhere, ship our e-shit around the world to less fortunate countries. We recoil at the visibly horrid air quality in cities like Beijing, we gasp when Americans whose land has been fracked show us that they can light the water pouring from their kitchen faucets on fire. We watch animals suffer unnecessary, painful deaths because they drown in oil slicks or suffocate on our haphazardly discarded plastics. We bitch and moan and worry and still, too many do nothing.

So today, as another Earth Day opens before us and many of us hope for the best, though the chances of successful, internationally-supported policy changes being passed and acted upon are starting to seem awfully dim, I ask you to consider the ways in which you interact with the world around you. Could you recycle more? Could you compost? Could you drive less? Could you eat less meat? When you eat meat, can you make sure that it comes from a real farm? Can you shut your car engine off when you're waiting in line somewhere? Idling fumes are nasty polluters.

If that all feels overwhelming and big, I get it. When I visit my hometown in Louisiana, I always leave depressed by the almost complete lack of recycling that goes on, by the chemicals sprayed with such abandon over yards and throughout the air (the mosquitoes are a serious plague, so I do get it but still). I think of how scary it is that so many people, on my parents' block alone, have died of cancer. That part of the state has a grim nickname- Cancer Alley. It feels like no one person could possibly make a difference, but that's not true.

You can also make change by thinking small. Think of your health, of your family's health. Go putter in your yard, sit in the grass, study the millions of tiny organisms that inhabit the space with you. Acknowledge and appreciate them. Read from the work of the wonderful E.O. Wilson; if you've never loved ants, you will after reading his stuff. Pick up Silent Spring if you've never read it. If you're more a fiction reader, check out Landscape by Donna Cousins (she also wrote the absorbing Waiting for Bones). It's a tremendously engaging read, and I have NEVER gardened in the same way since. And, there's always Barbara Kingsolver!

As you probably know, I am not a religious woman but I do stand in awe of the very real magic in the natural world, in the enormous, diverse panoply of non-human life that we too often ignore or undervalue. I truly don't think of our Earth as anything more than a luxurious place we are lucky to inhabit, temporarily and as borrowers only, for a short while each. As with anything of such value and impermanence, we must respect and tend it to the best of our ability.

“In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation... even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.”

― —Great Law of the Iroquois