Tag: nature

do I have a “native” habitat?

We decided to naturescape for the birds and the bees, in the beginning. Planting native wildflowers, clover and grasses on top of crunchy pecan leaves that would eventually be mulch. But pecan leaves are a pain. They start falling long before the autumn equinox, when trees have the nature’s okay to turn color and create the palette we stand in front of for family pictures. They cover our lawn in one way or another for most of the year, so naturescaping meant peacemaking with the pecans.

I’m not quite there yet (at peace with the pecans), but we did watch fritillary butterflies grow from skinny ‘lil babies to chrysalis plump. We noticed wrens and cardinals and mourning doves and mockingbirds and eastern towhees and tufted titmouses (titmice?) and downy woodpeckers. And we noticed a handful of other birds in different seasons, sitting early on the front steps in the morning. Listening. Is it nature taking back our yard as a habitat or is it just that I am listening?

Maybe it is both.

Some of the neighbors don’t mind. Actually, one of our sweet neighbors is a designated wildlife area and another has a 10 year plan to reclaim their yard to benefit the ecosystem where we live. So, we’re not the first with the idea. We’re just doing our best with free cardboard and harvested seeds and letting those blasted pecan leaves help where we can’t. They are cover for little insects and they are food for the ground and eventually compost to create a rich mix of soil for those little native seeds to grow.

I can’t help but think of native things. The idea that something– a plant or a person or a bird– belongs somewhere. This whole wide world in the mind of its Creator– with rocks carved out for waterfalls and mountains capped with snow and long, flat stretches of flowing wild grasses– is full of places and spaces designated specifically and uniquely to be a home, a place of belonging for something or someone. Cardinals and monarch butterflies and arctic foxes– they all have a sense of where they are supposed to be, to grow, to hunt, maybe even to die.

Humans are a bit more complicated. And not the least because our whole existence has been displacing people and plants and primates to make room for our ideas and inventions and ill-motivated conquests. We are not the world’s next best thing. We show up on the shores of places and we destroy. If we look at the long history of humanity, stretching back even further than the disasters of European explorers, we find destruction at the beginning or ending of every story. I’m no history expert, but as our home studies ancient worlds and middles ages, the stories all start to sound very similar.

I have a few moments now, while Pat puts finishing touches on our free book library out front. The cicadas push back the quiet and I wonder: what is native to our hearts? What belongs there, originally before the sins of self started to eat us from the inside? What has been choked out by invasive species that someone told us would be good to plant? What has been a nice, Bermuda grass landscape that has made my heart uninhabitable for the good, wild fruits to grow?

Thankfully, God is both the prologue and the epilogue to the books of history. He is before and after every place of destruction, inviting us into redemption season. Like a forest decimated by a fire, God invites us into the miracle of something new, green, and good growing up from the ashes of human destruction.

The analogies blur and my mind shakes back to our neighborhood picnic in an hour. Carrots, tomatoes, should I pack the BLT’s sitting on the table since we haven’t eaten lunch yet? I need to pick up my friend’s kids and find a cooler…

I do wonder if there is a place on this earth that a human feels “native.” Does that exist uniquely for each human or am I dreaming?

We started naturescaping for the birds and the bees, but maybe it is for my brain. Maybe I need to ask questions about why things are how they are and what needs to be ripped out. Maybe I need to let the soil inside rest so I can see what might grow when given the chance. Maybe naturescaping is a thing that can happen on the inside, too.

Posted on by Caroline 3

tragic beauty

It wasn’t the best decision I’ve ever made – running so soon after the rain on the river path toward the lake – but it felt like a good decision when I started out.

The first few blocks confirmed it, like my feet had been waiting to pound pavement all day long. When I got to the bridge, the sky was speaking of the storm that had just rumbled through.

The river rushed by just underneath the bridge, the sun streaked through the gray overhead, and the path stretched empty in front of me. I got emotional, there by the river that was breaking its boundaries and threatening flood.

What is it about the stillness after the storm?

Storms feel destructive and powerful and foreboding… at least in tornado season, or hurricane season, or after a tsunami. Storms can be a cold violence, but then those bright rays peek through the gray and the air is quiet. The settled stillness is peaceful – like two rowdy men in a back alley brawl called a truce and the alley is full of empty again. All the punches have already been thrown and resolution stretches to fill the silence with peace.

I saw the mountain of debris in between my strides – tree limbs, plastic bags, and bits of unidentified things trapped between a bridge and a bank. Debris is one of those words that sounds more beautiful than what it defines (maybe that is many words in French?). “The remains of something broken down or destroyed,” doesn’t sound beautiful. It sounds like ruin. The debris that gathered under the bridge didn’t make sense together – the massive pile of natural and unnatural odds and ends were not supposed to be blocking the river the way they were.

I realized I had slowed my pace and was taking a mental picture of the floating mass. I was thinking about Oklahoma and trying to imagine what a town would look like after being leveled in an instant.

Isn’t there a mysterious sort of beauty after a storm has passed? When the stillness swallows up the storm’s screeching and the gray clouds let the light back in.

Maybe I’m making little sense. But we often use the phrases “tragic beauty” and “beautiful scandal” in a way that assumes they make sense. In literature and movies and conversation and news stories, we all recognize there is beauty within and around and in between the debris of tragedy.

I kept running while my brain ran to find reasons debris could be beautiful. The path was deserted – just a solitary man on a bike crossed in front of my running feet. When I got to Gray’s Lake and had run halfway around it, I realized the reason the paths were empty: it was closed due to flooding. The ducks could not figure out whether to swim in the streets or the river. They didn’t even move when I passed. And then in the middle of the bridge (that runs across the lake), I found myself running inside a storm.

That’s when I thought it was a stupid idea to be on a run, but you can’t do much but run when you are halfway across the bridge in a downpour and a couple miles from home. I laughed a little bit, prayed a little bit that I wouldn’t get struck by lightning, and thought a little bit about how peaceful it had seemed moments before.

The rain died down and I navigated the flooded paths while wondering if I could get arrested for going around wood barricades. The lake returned to its placid state and the stillness swallowed up the last of the storm’s brawl. The park looked like a photoshop creation, with all the green hues and perfect dew drops on perfect blooms.

I ran back past the mass of debris trapped underneath the bridge by 5th Street and thought about all the natural disasters with all their masses of debris that sometimes stretch the length of a city. How can we call that beautiful? That stillness after the storm?

I was in middle school when a very powerful windstorm hit our rural area. Everyone was in a productive panic (I think rural areas are especially good at this) and the children were all sent home from school early. We arrived at home and my oldest brother looked out on our property (with several less roofs on buildings, as they had been flung into the fields) and said, “Wow. God is awesome!”

The post-storm calmness had claimed the horizon and what my brother saw when he looked out from our front porch was God’s awesomeness.

It doesn’t make any sense. How can something destructive uncover something beautiful?

Sometimes things just don’t make sense. Sometimes they are swallowed up into the greater mystery of a world beyond us, a reality beyond this, and an eternity that is beyond the reach of disaster.

Sometimes what is unsteady and unpredictable in the world is at its brightest contrast to what is forever and true.

Is that how beauty peeks through with rays of sunlight when the storm settles down? Does tragedy in this world somehow shake us from temporary sight to see something eternal?

Posted on by Caroline 0

Spring is waking the slumbered

I never thought my heart would race at full parking lots or that my lips would form a smile at the line of shirtless men fishing off the 4th Street bridge. Nope, never thought I’d be getting a rush from the sound of a lawn mower or the open-window chatter in the neighborhood.

Does Spring race your heart? It does mine.

I was running the river path, breathing in the hot Spring air and battling the strong breeze. My feet pounded steady while my thoughts jostled into some sense, but I kept wanting to giggle. I did a few times, I think. All those white-chested, shirtless men on 4th Street were quite the spectacle – with their fishing poles hanging lazy over the bridge. You know, just city fishing on a Sunday afternoon.

I loved it. I think it’s because Spring shakes out all the winter slumber of indoor activities. Spring beckons us to come out and frolic in it’s sunshine. Have you noticed it is incredibly hard to say “No” to a barbeque or a picnic or a walk in the park when Spring arrives? Am I the only one who feels the stretching and waking of Spring in my soul? I wanted to stop and savor the city fisherman and the crowd of bikers at the bar and the full parking lot at the park.

I wanted to let the delight sink in.

Maybe Spring doesn’t inspire you. Maybe your neighbor doesn’t have the most beautiful flowering magnolia tree. Maybe your neighbors don’t grill out on their patios and play latin music. Maybe where you are from, people stay indoors and don’t mow their lawns or pick up sticks in the front yard. Maybe the sun doesn’t shine on the river and the breeze doesn’t feel electric against your skin. Maybe your neighbors don’t accept your dinner invites and maybe you don’t have a patio set that your dad picked up at a thrift store.

I guess I could see how that kind of Spring would have a hard time waking you from winter slumber.

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

 

Posted on by Caroline 0