Here is a small piece that I wrote last year around this time: Easter Sunday: the Resurrection of the Trees: After finishing teaching a Permaculture course at the glorious Accokeek Foundation on the Potomac River, across from Mount Vernon, I find myself in Arlington, Virginia, a sprawling, peopled megalopolis of pentagons and national government. Peering down from my hotel room the yards of condos and apartment buildings are a blank slate: brown lawns, brick walls, a concrete and macadam mass, a conveyor belt of automobiles, and not a soul to be seen on foot. Where are the human beings? What two-dimensional world do they inhabit? What virtual non-existence? The only forgiving grace is the trees, like church spires blinking in the sun above the rectangular meltdown of settlement. We live and breathe off the “waste” of trees, oxygen cycling through our lungs, fruits cycling through our guts, biomass cycling though the intestine of the soil, and doing it all over and over again, endlessly. Knowing this, that the primary producers of this earth are circumvented by the willy-nilly and catastrophic reclamation of land by a petroleum addicted tornado of a status seeking culture, wallowing atop piles of greenbacks, these lone trees, church spires blinking in the sun (our backbone), is the grace of the world. On this Easter Sunday, may the trees be the resurrection of this world. May the trees in their strength be the promise of this and the generations to come. May we plant them, and plant more of them so they may lift their sprawling arms to the benevolent sky and proclaim: “We are the cross to bear, we are the promise of all generations, we are the air you breathe and the giver of gifts. May we serve the humanity in all we do, but may you serve us, care for us, nurture us. Let us come to an agreement. The relationship works both ways. We’ll scratch your bark, if you’ll scratch ours. So be it.”
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 13:26:19 +0000
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