The last couple of years I’ve found that I do my best thinking in the garden. Just as the sprouts burst through the soil, yearning and reaching for the light, so too I find my thoughts springing forth from my mind, longing to expand, searching for enlightenment.
Working a garden has seasons just like the year. There are times when you are working your tail off everyday, early in the morning and late into the evening, trying to get everything done in the timeframe you have available. There are other times where you are just doing maintenance. There are also times when you are mostly just waiting and watching. One of the things I’m learning is that another busy time is the end of the season when you have to begin taking things down and preparing the soil for its winter replenishing. That’s where we currently are as the first day of autumn is only a few days away. To borrow — and take completely out of context — a line from the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, “The harvest is passed, the summer has ended.”
This time of year is always sad. The verdant and bountiful glory that we’ve celebrated and harvested for months is growing ever slower, more brown, and more barren, by the day. This morning I looked at the okra and thought to myself, “In just a few weeks, there will be no more fresh okra for at least nine months.” I also thought to myself, “Man, this is a lot of work for such a short window of reward.” That’s when it hit me: this is true for most good things in life.
Good things seldom come easy, and when they do, it usually just means that someone who came before us did a lot of really hard work and we were fortunate enough to live in the time when their work was bearing it’s fruit. Momentum is a powerful thing — Isaac Newton taught us that once it gets rolling it tends to roll for a long time — but entropy would like a word too, and things eventually fall apart.
Standing in the midst of this rapidly decaying garden, I see parallels to my rapidly decaying culture. I tell my boys all the time, one of the hardest parts of “now” is knowing that no matter how much I try to explain to them that the word I grew up in no longer exists, they will never understand just how different this world is. I’m old enough to know that I too have changed, and because of that I see many things differently, but it’s much more than that; it’s a full paradigm shift and the monumental — though at times horrifically flawed — efforts of our ancestors is beginning to run out. There is an irony in my being a member of Generation X and my grandchildren are Generation Z, as in the last letters of the alphabet, because it certainly feels like we've reached the end of something. I genuinely believe our best days are behind us and the cold winds of a long and dark winter are beginning to blow. If we want to see the fruitful days of spring and summer again, we are going to have to commit to the hard work of building that world. To borrow another line from Jeremiah, we must “uproot and tear down…build and plant.”
So many of the good things we have taken for granted, things we inherited, are withering on the vine and will have to be replanted and rebuilt to be restored. Democracy, civil rights, scientific advancement that benefits the masses without exploiting the masses, free and safe education, public health, compassion, benevolence, generosity, honesty, integrity, mercy, privacy, possibility. I was born into a world where these things were available in abundance and available to more and more people with each passing year. Now, with most of my life behind me, it certainly looks like we are regressing. The fruit of previous generation’s good works has an expiration date.
This isn’t a pessimistic, hopeless screed about the state of the world, where I shake my fist and rant to the sky, “Back in my day….”. This is actually a rallying cry — even if its only to myself — that yes, the harvest is past and the summer has ended, but there is work to be done, even in winter, so that growth returns in spring. Now is the time to tell the truth, treat everyone as you would want to be treated, love your neighbor, be kind, be merciful, be compassionate, be forgiving, be generous, and stand up for what is right, even if you are standing alone. You won’t be forever, others will join and the momentum will slowly begin to shift again. Since I’ve quoted Jeremiah, I might as well thrown in one from the other primary prophet of Israel, Isaiah — now is the time to take root downward so that we can bear fruit upward.
Comments
Post a Comment