The Pace of Progress
Hi. It’s been a while. Writing for this blog— and even writing for myself — is a practice I often create barriers around. Historically, I have told myself that it has to be the correct time of day, with just the right balance of alertness and reflection in mind, etc etc. I digress. Explaining my hangups around writing is, at its crux, a barrier in itself. Here I am! Writing.
Spring has arrived here in the mountains of WNC. In a region that experienced such massive ecological devastation just as autumn was setting in, the returning of blossoms and vegetation has been a much needed sign of restoration. It is also proving to be a time of painful inventory. Storm debris is being hauled off at increasing rates, which is exposing a more accurate visual of just how much damage this landscape endured. There are layers to these wounds, a shocking deepness to the scars.
Invasive plant species are notorious for thriving in disturbed areas, and this growing season will be a reckoning. I keep asking myself, how will we know when we’ve lost the battle against plants that are so aggressively suited to the realities of our changing ecology? Is it useful to allocate resources to removing invasives if the methodology can never be watertight? I pull the arum in my yard, but the birds eat its pervasive seeds from untended areas nearby and bring it back into my yard. I feel trapped in this process as it starts all over again. I dream of using Birds as Ecological Tools of Goodwill, increasing their access to native seeds to help repopulate the earth with plant species crucial to the survival of localized insect populations, and by association basically everything else in an ecosystem.
As I’ve been watching with horror the speed of politics and the changing weather patterns in their respective chaos, I have felt crushed by the sense of powerlessness. I have at times succumb to the conclusion that whomever is left after the terrors and fevers have run their course, it will be on the survivors to pick up the pieces as best they can. A daunting, bleak vision of the future. I’ve been distracted by the viewpoint that destructive forces work quickly, while constructive ones work slowly. It’s been a coping framework— for Helene, for the post-election world— but I am reaching its limitations and seeing it for what it is: an oversimplification.
Today while watering my garden, I felt that delicious and familiar bliss one gets from tending to the plants: the witnessing of growth and change in realtime. The garden as a metaphor is a lens I find great calm in viewing the world through. And here she is again with her messages of hope. These impossibly small seeds I put carefully into the ground last week have, against all odds, found their way to the surface, and will expand and exhale and work their magic all season long. Not all constructive energy takes years. The garden inhabits an annual cycle, bound to the sun. I’m feeling optimistic that the ideologies I plant this spring will bear fruit this summer, that those of us who feel helpless and frustrated and angry will find our power as the beans creep taller and the berries grow plumper.