An ocean of light

An ocean of light?

Mark Twain put some hard truths in the mouth of his most famous character, Huckleberry Finn.  When Huck sees the “Duke” and the “King,” the two scoundrels who have tormented him and Jim for weeks, tarred and feathered, set on a rail, and run out of town, he allows that “human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”

Evidence of human cruelty to other humans is everywhere apparent these days. It is there in Russia’s assault on the Ukraine, in the Taliban’s assault on women, in the Supreme Court’s contempt for precedent despite assertions to the contrary, in the viciousness of laws passed by so many state legislatures punishing women for their capacity to give birth. What kind of man or woman would require a daughter who has been raped by her father to give birth to that child?

This past Mother’s Day, I averred that this country should not be allowed to pretend to the fiction of caring for mothers and the holiday should be cancelled.

George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, was no stranger to the fact that humans can be awful cruel to one another. He was beaten numerous times, thrown into ditches, confined to miserable prisons, and regularly knocked about in various ways. He saw, clearly, “that there was an ocean of darkness and death.” But he also saw “an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.”

I am struggling to hold onto the vision of “an infinite ocean of light and love” covering the ocean of darkness.  It is not easy. The garden helps.

The most recent issue of Horticulture includes an article by Mary Purpura whose experience of being healing by her garden inspired her to become a horticultural therapist. She writes:

“What if we are hardwired to experience healing, meaning and wholeness through contact with the natural world? What if being outdoors in natural settings, what if touching and smelling plants, what if observing birds and animals are good for us in a series of indescribable ways, a kind of X factor of nature-exposure benefits?”

Most intriguing to me was her report on a Japanese study in which participants were given different materials to touch, including a leaf.  Touching the real plant had a recorded calming effect, but the subjects weren’t consciously aware of it; they didn’t describe a change in feelings.

Purpura writes: “That means on some unconscious level the participant’s bodies noticed the difference between humanmade and natural materials, as if we are physiologically and psychologically wired to experience a relaxation response in contact with plants.”

I suspect it is our lack of awareness on the conscious level of what we get from plants that has allowed us as humans to destroy so much of nature in the process of what we like to call civilization.  Recall that Huck, at the end of his book, lights out for the Territory in order to avoid being “sivilized.”  For me, the Territory is the garden.

In the pandemic winter of 2021, I gathered together over zoom a small group of Master Gardeners, all living within the Town of Bethlehem, to read and discuss Doug Tallamy’s Nature’s Best Hope. A sobering account of what is happening to bird and insect populations as we destroy and deplete their habitats and an equally sobering account of the consequences of these losses, Best Hope is also infused with the optimism and creative thinking of its author. Tallamy believes that much of the damage could be stopped, and even reversed, by homeowners making different decisions about how they use their backyards.

Tallamy point out that millions of acres across the United States are in private hands. Many of these acres are covered by lawns. From the perspective of restoring the native habitat that our birds and bees need for survival, the traditional grass lawn is a dead zone.

So Tallamy asks, “What if each American landowner made it a goal to convert half of his or her lawn to productive native plant communities? Even moderate success could collectively restore some semblance of ecosystem function to more than twenty million acres of what is now an ecological wasteland.”

Tallamy proposes that we call this restoration Homegrown National Park. It will, he points out, be bigger in acreage than “the Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks” combined. And he adds, “It gives me the shivers just to write about it.”

An ocean of light?

On Saturday, April 30, a group of volunteers gathered together to begin the project of reimagining some of the Bethlehem Town Hall’s front lawn. Inspired by Tallamy’s vision and organized by the original reading group, volunteers included members of the Bethlehem Garden Club, Albany County Cornell Cooperative Extension Master Gardeners, participants from the Bethlehem Children’s School, and members of the Town of Bethlehem community, including Town Supervisor David Van Luven.

Together, this group planted over 30 native shrubs and almost 100 native perennials.

It was, we hope, a good day for the pollinators and other insects we depend upon for so many essential ecosystem functions. Remember, insects not only pollinate blossoms; they aerate the soil and control insect and plant pests. Many insects, especially beetles, are scavengers, feeding on dead animals and fallen trees, thereby recycling nutrients back into the soil.

It was also a good day for us humans. The cooperation and good spirits that accompanied this project definitely created at least a pond of light. And we all reaped nature exposure benefits that lightened our spirits.

A second phase will happen some time later in May, when we will plant the remaining 125 perennials.

Watching these gardeners ease each other’s labor with simple gestures of help, I was reminded of another of Huck’s observations. In the middle of a funeral, a commotion breaks out in the basement of the church. The mourners are distracted and cannot can pay attention to the service.  Slowly and silently, the undertaker slides out of the service and into the basement, silences the dog, and comes back with the news, whispered to the preacher, “He had a rat.” At which point Huck comments, “A little thing like that don’t cost nothing, and it’s just the little things” that count.

Of course, the scene is funny, even a bit satiric, but the comment is Huck’s response to his witness of human cruelty – kindness.

So here’s to practicing kindness, the little kindnesses that “don’t cost nothing” and that we each can do every day wherever we are. And let’s practice kindness even if it costs. If we do enough of these things, little and big, perhaps we will create an ocean of light to cover the ocean of darkness.