Long shadows

What do you look toward, when you are fearful, sad or anxious?

On days when you have to make yourself do too many tedious things that you do not want to do, but since you are an adult, you are expected to do them anyway?

On days when you fear your life is going to waste, or your path has disappeared, or that this is all there is and it is not enough?

The only thing I can think of to do right now is to look outside of myself and into the garden.

Nokomis Naturescape, Minneapolis

That's it. My one answer. I feel a little dose of joy each day when I see the first butterflies and bees of the day nourishing themselves on flowers I planted there, for the express purpose of feeding them.

In my very mundane life, that feels like a gift and a wonder to me. To look up and catch a glimpse of an orange-winged treasure flashing in the golden light, gliding down from that vast summer sky to circle, climb, circle again to finally land on the perfect flower from which to drink, on this infinitesimally small bit of planet earth.

All the more precious since their population is threatened by humans, as everything on this earth is threatened by humans, except for the very occasional things that are helped by humans.

Like the butterflies who visit my tiny waystation, and I hope many many other waystations as they make their way to Mexico.

So heartfelt thanks to the butterflies for bringing a smile to my lips and un-furrowing my furrowed brow for a moment each day during the many weeks of summer. They feel like companions to me.

Gratitude to the goldfinches, who now hide in the tall serviceberry next to the house and make speedy garden forays, gripping with their feet the seedheads of hyssop, coneflowers and bergamot as they eat one tiny, pointed seed at a time.


[no photo, but they are a darting bright yellow and olive yellow, with handsome black and white stripes]


Oh bringing love love love to drive off despair and violence of every sort, disrespect and destruction, leaf blowers and the weeping of the world. I am far too small to feel all that love...but the right size for the timely presence of a butterfly to still fill me with joy.

And there are lakes, and clouds, and wind-blown blue days that smell like the wildness of creation.

Earthly gifts are the ones that have weight and substance. That feel real. That feed us, the people.

(Not humans—the people. Humans are biological constructs, the people are body-and-spirit. This is what I've just decided.)

Earthly gifts are sacred gifts, and oh how this world needs more protectors of the sacred.

What if I pared away all the parts of my life that feel like junk food.

That deplete rather than replenish life and health. Would it help?

What would be left?

I don't know. Where is the center? What holds it all together?

I read about Hope Bourne, a wild soul of a writer who moved to Exmoor at the age of 52 to live off the land in an old caravan. She wrote:

“For money, you sell the hours and the days of your life, which are the only true wealth you have. You sell the sunshine, the dawn and the dusk, the moon and the stars, the wind and the rain, the green fields and the flowers, the rivers and the sweet fresh air. You sell health and joy and freedom.” 

Everything in me responds to this. It is what I most fear! My heart nearly breaks just to see it put into words, the commodification of our lives and the great loss of our birthright: the light of day, freedom to move, to experience the life of the planet.

But I almost feel crazy sometimes, because I do not know anyone else who feels this way, and our society does not support feeling this way either—far, far from it.

What this society supports is work and work and work, and feel grateful that you have a job, don't expect more than work, and you are of no value and irrelevant as an individual unless you are working.

And even THAT doesn't make you of value, unless you are rich. Because those are the people a money society values.

I feel the grief of this so keenly at this moment. Our lives are commodities that only we can value at their true worth. But once we know their true value, how do we live as if we honor that?

How do we get our lives back?

What—or who—do we have to leave behind in order to do it?

To care and care for

Butterfly. Gentle spirit floating on the summer breeze, where are you?

Maybe you have heard about the worldwide collapse of honey bee colonies. One-third of the honey bees in the U.S. have vanished in the past few years--in fact, records show there are sixty percent fewer bee colonies than there were in 1947 in the U.S.

At the outdoor "Pollinator Party" I attended a couple of weeks ago were a number of passionate save-the-bees organizations, back yard beekeepers, the University of Minnesota Bee Squad and more folks, all gathering to learn, educate and hopefully, combat this concerning state of affairs.

Honey bee diving headfirst into a tasty blossom.

And now, the butterflies. I've seen three of them in my yard this summer. Three butterflies! When we were once companioned each summer afternoon by glowing orange wings fluttering, skimming over the grass, tiny black feet gripping flower petals, tongues unfurling to sip the nectar of our yards' daisies, zinnias, bee balm and roses.

Now it is August, Lammas; nearly time for the fragile, winged ones to start again on their long, long journey south, and there are few, so few to even make the trip, to lay their eggs, to overwinter in California and Mexico in glorious, breathing masses on their favorite roosting trees.

The newspaper reports that the monarch population has crashed because of the cold spring. Too cold to fly north, too cold for nectar-bearing plants to bloom when the monarch needed food and the milkweed wasn't big enough for the monarchs to lay their eggs on.

As our remaining wild places--the woodlots, highway ditches, open fields and stream edges--are mowed, treated with chemicals, planted with crops or replaced by concrete and asphalt, there is less and less milkweed and other nectar sources to sustain monarchs on their epic journey from Minnesota to Mexico and back again.


But wait--aren't butterflies and bees indicator species? Yes. And they are dying off by the millions, because we are destroying what they need to survive. And because we are outright killing them with pesticides. A generation of monarchs has been lost. Who notices? Who cares? John Caddy, a wonderful poet-naturalist and teacher living in Minnesota, writes:

A suddenly rare monarch butterfly

honors my yard.

Last year dozens, this year three.

All the big butterflies 

are suddenly--BANG--gone

Generations of butterflies,

swallowtails, fritillaries,

monarchs, admirals gone,

slaughtered by genetically modified 

Roundup-Ready corn.

But we will have corn syrup for our obesity

and we’ll have ethanol for our cars,

while Monsanto stockholders

grin above their jowls

and our children lose the magic

bequeathed them by the Earth

ever since human eyes opened. 

Their eyes will be less bright

and they will not know it.

from Morning Earth Daily Healing Images, August 2, 2013

Let me state here: I Care.

You care, otherwise you wouldn't be reading a web journal called Wildspell in the first place, and writing your own wild blogs...and I need and have to believe that there are many of us out there, and that we are each doing something about this planetary crisis in our own back yards.

We are writing our legislators, asking our stores to take these insecticides off the shelves.

We are unleashing our most powerful words to sound the alarm, we are painting visions inspired by our love and concern, conjuring up spells of protection, planting milkweed pods by the bucketful, nurturing what needs nurturing inside and out.

Restoring prairies, building brush piles to shelter beetles, learning about our native birds and wildflowers, breathing and feeling gratitude and blessing the earth every day. Falling under the enchantment of bluebells.

Praying, even if we don't believe in a god or goddess, that a shift is coming, a way of living on this beautiful planet that sustains it instead of destroys it.

During my daily life, I keep encountering these words written by Wendell Berry, and I wonder, is this it? I think, yes. This is what the world wants to happen, this is what The Team wants to happen, what so many loving and compassionate, connected and sane, tree-hugging-river-honoring people want to happen, and maybe it is time. Finally, it is time:

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it." (Full quote here.)

Let me tell you, I am afraid. Frustrated, furious, stricken with grief. As I consider these losses I feel, in the apocryphal words of Chief Seattle, a great loneliness of spirit. What are we doing? How can I get off this ride, this society that I was born to? How can I stop harming and start healing that which I most love?

The loss of our fellow creatures is the keenest of all humanity's many losses, and I mourn them continually, with every breath, at a level so deep I can't name it. I think we all do, we can't help but do--they are part of us, the bright and shining ones, they fill our hearts with joy and wonder, they are our only blood companions on this earth, our relatives; our dearest treasures, surely?

I try to turn toward hope, for fear I will be mired in endless grief, unable to act or mend or change anything. Gary Snyder says, “Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.” “You can describe the predicament that we’re in as an emergency,” says Wendell Berry, “and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.... you’re going to have to humble yourself to be willing to do it one little bit at a time."

He also says, “Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.”

I went in search of monarch butterflies at Longfellow Gardens. I strolled around each garden plot: vanilla-scented heliotrope, sweet cigarette tubes of nicotiana, nose-itching echinacea, the cider-vinegar of rich compost...found beauty, but no butterflies.

And I understood something: how sterile, pointless and empty a garden feels without butterflies and bees and hummingbirds beguiling our eyes, gathering food, supporting life on this planet.

I picked my way through the sunny meadow: musty-lemon scent of bergamot, sweet anise weeds, flutter of white moths...but no butterflies.

Finally, a flash of sun on orange wings led me a merry chase up and down paths, to the wild-spilling edges of the lawns where native thistles, bergamot and prairie coneflowers sprang purple, lavender and softbright yellow. There, on the edges, she finally settled to breathe for a moment, display her wings, playing the coy celebrity to my dogged paparazza.

I spoke to her, thanked her, wished her well with all the power of good wishing in me, the lone butterfly.

Tonight, I'm learning a little about how to raise monarchs. I will tend to them and nurture them in my best mama manner, so they can be tagged and released at my neighborhood's annual Monarch Festival in early September.

This is something I can do.

We are on a mission, my friend. For you, I share these words, which combine an affirmation, a call to action and a flickering brightness among the clouds...perhaps like light catching the wings of one small butterfly, fluttering its way across a huge continent because that is what was made to do, and hope is what we were made to do:

“The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.” 

--Wendell Berry