It’s late October and the trees in the neighborhood are looking like late October. Though much of the landscape is looking barer and duller with the fallen leaves, I found a few patches of bright color
In my own backyard.
Though I hate to see the leaves fall, I do love it when the wind blows and leaves fall like rain, blowing and drifting in the wind. This morning I made photographs out my windows of the changes I see after just a few short days.
It astonishes me how quickly the leaves fall at the end of the season. For a while, when they are brightening into brilliant gold, orange, red, and russet, just a few leaves fall. Then suddenly it seems that all the leaves fall down, sometimes in the matter of only a few hours. I remember parking once on a Minneapolis street under a beautiful tree full of golden leaves. When I returned to my car an hour and a half later, the tree was bare, my car covered with golden leaves. It was as if the tree decided, “I’m getting naked right now!”
Sometimes change happens so slowly that we barely notice it. But other times changes occur suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere. But if you look closely you will often see that the change was occurring, we just didn’t notice it. I think that is the case with climate change. Though we knew it was happening, it was easy to ignore or deny. Now it is impossible to ignore and those who continue to deny it are liars, fools, or con artists.
In the Name of Progress
I think back to my youth and realize how naive many of us were. We believed that we were building a better world through chemistry, industrialization, and modern science. Little did we know that little by little we were causing great harm to our world and all of the species that inhabit it. And even when many realized the damage we were doing to the earth, others knowingly denied climate change evidence for economic gains. There are still those who would extract everything they can, in the name of the almighty dollar, without regard for the future of our planet.
What makes us humans so selfish and stupid? Much of it has to do with slow change and how easy it is to ignore until it reaches a tipping point. Other parts are related to our society’s values I think. We live in a patriarchal society focused more on power over nature and other people, rather than respecting and co-existing with nature and other people.
In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.
― Braiding Sweetgrass
At a conference on complexity science I attended in the early 2000’s I remember vividly a cynical biologist saying that he held little hope for self-organization helping solve our planet’s problems because humans “sucked” at communal life. His example, “Bees don’t create their own private stash of nectar. They work for the benefit of the whole hive. But humans always have a few (sometimes many) bad actors who insist on creating their own private stash.”
What’s a person to do?
I keep coming back to the idea of doing the next right thing in my own backyard. Every day I am doing what I can to support nature, reduce my consumption, rand reuse. I’m looking at ways to regenerate and renew our earth. And I’m writing and making photographs that share the astonishing beauty of this earth.
Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
― Braiding Sweetgrass
The other thing I’m working on (as always I am a work in progress) is allowing myself to feel ALL my feelings including the grief and heaviness I feel about the current state of the world. Denial is a bitter hard-to-digest pill, that serves no one.
Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair.
― Braiding Sweetgrass
What are you doing in your own backyard?
May you walk in beauty.
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