Deep Humble Learning Is What's Required

 I am finally well again, after surviving a three-week virus that had me wondering if I would ever get well. When you're down for that long, hardly remembering what it feels like to be your normal self, it is cause for happy celebration once the virus leaves. And for three days now, I've been well, and I am SO grateful! Now I can begin to catch up with everything that fell by the wayside while I was sick. 

Today was a special day, for the monthly meeting of our Earthcare Working Group met here at Prairie Hill. We began our meeting, as usual, going around the circle of all of us, each telling of some inspiring or interesting earthy thing that we experienced during the last month. It is such a positive way to start our time together. And it becomes a bunch of individuals sharing of themselves before doing something together. After our check-in, the program consisted of two parts. First we discussed the book that we've been reading for the past couple months: The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth  by Zoe Schlanger. This is an amazing book. It is full of research stories that show that plants are complex beings, intelligent, perceptive, adaptable, communicators, cooperative and creative. And in so many ways, they are just as complex and full of abilities as we humans are. It is one thing to read a book alone in your free time, and quiet another experience to share your reactions, enthusiasms, questions and highlights with a group of people who have also read the book. I was reminded of one of the truths found in this book and everywhere: a community of life is so much better than one single being. So a room-full of single beings today celebrated and marveled at what we'd learned from Zoe Schlanger's story.

The second half of our meeting was devoted to watching the film, "Restoring Biodiversity at Home" by Doug Tallamy. Doug is interested in the dynamics of our earth, and his special interest starts with insects. He points out that if we had no insects, all the rest of life would die. Our human attitude toward insects is pretty negative. They buzz around us, bite us, get in our way, eat the plants we might be growing. And insecticides are used all over the world to kill off our pest insects. Yet insects are the basis, the food, for bigger life. We need them! And Doug is helping us rearrange our priorities in order to plant at least part of the otherwise mowed lawns around our homes with native species. These are attractive and nutritional to the insects, providing environments where insects and the animals and birds that depend upon them can thrive. Doug has started a wide organization called Homegrown National Park, and helps people all over the country to start reclaiming small and larger patches of earth for Nature. Instead of thinking of natural areas as something unusual and pretty, something removed from our everyday life, something we can go and see in parks, we need to be welcoming Nature into our places of housing, our living/working areas. We need the healing effects of natural areas everywhere.

We ended our meeting with a closing round. Each person shared how they would take the things they'd learned today out into the world. Another upbeat, uplifting sharing that sent us on our way with lightness and optimism.

The themes of our meeting were running through my mind as I watched the Cubs baseball game tonight. The folks in our group, because of the influences of the book and the movie, were realizing in new ways that we need to reexamine our place in the circle of life. Perhaps once, our species had not arrived at a stance where we thought we were the top dog of the universe. In prehistoric times, humans probably lived more closely to the natural world. But for many centuries, we have been moving further and further from a true understanding of our place in the web of life. Today even intelligent, well-informed people tend to lead their lives quite removed from other forms of life. We've paved over the surface of the earth with concrete, plowed up prairies to plant mono-crops, cut down forests, damned rivers, built buildings over much of the planet. Our culture focuses on humans, our needs, our pleasures, our accumulations of "wealth".  By the end of our meeting today, I think we were re-aligning ourselves to the myriad forms of life around us. Like many indigenous people, we were thinking of the oak tree, the caterpillar, the algae, the birds as our brothers and sisters. This is a difficult switch, for we are used to gauging the goodness of things by our own bodies, our own skills. Yet other beings have different skills, totally different than ours, and theirs are just as important, just as impressive. Instead of being at the top, being the rulers, we need to step down and settle in with all our "relatives". After all, we all came from the same kind of cell, millions of years ago. We all started the same, from a tiny cell that came to life. And over the millennia, we've all grown and changed and taken different tracks. Once the first life crawled out of the ocean onto land, things began to change even more. Plants began to use the sun to photosynthesize for food, flowers began to attract pollinators, and the first animals began to evolve in synchrony. We all came from the same source, and our progress and differentiation over the millions of years is a story that awes us. What we forget is that we are part of the whole story, not the rulers. We are part of the tapestry, not better, not worse, just in the center of everything else. And until we learn this, our world is in peril.

I try to be compassionate toward our species, but it takes effort, for we have gotten things so wrong for so long. Yes, we've done incredible things, but we've forgotten what supports us. And until we remember and start caring fervently for a healthier web of life around us, our future is in jeopardy. What cheers me is that there are many, many of us who care, who are trying to mend our ways, who are putting big effort into taking care of the natural world and bringing it to our doorsteps. And together, communities of people have always been able to change the world. Even if the people at the "top" have no interest in this, it is the people at the base who have power to change things. We can support each other, share perspectives, talk and plan, and cheer each other on. That's where I want to put my attention!