toni mcnaron's garden

Deep Space

The James Webb telescope is sending back amazing images from deep space, changing our whole approach to the universe and our place within it. Recently I saw ten of those photographs and was mesmerized by them. The colors and amorphous shapes drew me in to the unknown, suggesting movement and change and something beyond. Those of actual planets (xo planets, I was to learn) awoke my imagination and stirred my intellect. I just sat at my computer screen and gazed at what the marvelous instrument was showing me.

While I was so engaged, I began to think about Creationists who truly believe God created the world as we know it in six days and then rested on the seventh. I wanted them to look at the same ten photographs I was looking at, since the longer I stared at them and the closer I let them get to my innermost being, the more I felt I was looking at creation as it was occurring so very far away from me and my tiny world called Earth.

If a creator could form our planet in all its wonders and glories, why would that force be content to stop creating once “earth” was set in motion? Wasn’t it just possible that the process of creating forms in an unending and incalculable universe IS “god.” And might these images from the Webb telescope not make visually clear that science and faith need not be set against each other. Rather it is science that is allowing us here on our created planet to experience the wonderful reality of planets and sounds and stars beyond number and imagination. That in itself is a miracle, surely, showing just how amazing the human brain can be even as it renders unarguable just how tiny we humans actually are in relation to all that is “out there.”

Speech after long silence

This is the first line of a poem by William Butler Yeats that I have liked for many years. It’s written to a woman he loved when very young, but I have brought it to mind when I’ve been out of touch and am re-engaging with myself or a friend. It’s been quite a while since I’m written a blog, so I’m pleased to here typing these words. It’s high summer so I’m in my yard a lot, weeding or watering because we’re in deep drought. That means all my flowers/bushes/trees call out as I walk past them, so I move the hoses to help. Weeds thrive in dry weather so I can’t stay ahead of them with a garden as extensive as mine.

My water bills are exorbitant, but my garden is full of living, blooming life.  My front yard has not a single blade of grass and the back has a patch of green grass-like things, e.g., creeping Charlie, clover, little wild violets.   I have that patch because people tell me if there is NO grass or a fence, some prospective buyers don’t look seriously at your house if they have a child/children and/or a dog/dogs.  The front is mostly perennials (day lillies, hostess, bee balm, salvia, butterfly bush, hyssop, bergamot) and a few bright annuals (begonias, impatiens, petunias, pansies).  

The back garden used to be another mix of annuals and perennials, but I’m listening to naturalists who say everything we plant in our gardens should support some other life form, so I’m letting the back go native.  Scads of milkweed that I used to cut back or even yank out of the ground; plain old white daisies that I dug up but they kept returning; wild columbine that I never used to keep because it was just a dull bronze that faded fast.  I’ve keep the long row of indigo bushes because I see lots of bees and worms near them.

When I am in my yard, I can lose track of time–Audre Lorde once said her definition of the erotic was anything we engage in where we lose track of time.  She went on to say if we are lucky, some of those times may involve sex, but most will not.  My reliable”erotic” activities, then, are gardening and painting walls.  When the former president was doing one horrible thing after the other, I retreated to my gardens as often and time and weather allowed so I could forget him for an hour or so.  

These days of increasing climate crisis, sometimes even my garden can’t let me escape the reality because there simply is not much ground water under the surface.  So when I water with hoses or the universes waters with rain, you can’t tell in a few hours because the water going into the ground is not echoed by ground water that receives it and increases.  But I persist because the alternative is unacceptable.

Trees

The first words I read about trees was the much-panned poem by Joyce Kilmer.  My mother had me memorize and recite “Trees”  when I was about ten.  I remember the opening and closing lines–“I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as a tree,” and “For poems are made by fools like me/But only God can make a tree.,”  Though I was a generation before Maurice Sendak’s books, I was drawn to his powerful trees when reading his poems to children.  And of course I adored J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ents, heroic trees who helped the good guys elude the bad guys in the Ring Trilogy.  Even Shakespeare gave me important trees in “Macbeth,” when Macduff disguises his army to look like the woods of Dunsinane.  

I have my own experiences with trees, three of which I will share.  I was encouraged to learn to amuse myself as a child and one of my favorite outdoor games was with my fleet of tiny cars/trucks.  I’d take them into the side yard and put them on adventures around and through open spaces of a huge old sycamore tree.  My game was “getting away,” so I’d hide them from an invisible enemy intent on forcing them back into their tiny, dark garage.  The tree was both protection and helper.  When I rested from trying to escape, I’d hide myself close to the gnarly trunk and feel hidden.  As an adolescent, I had learned to garden with help from my mother who was on her knees in the dirt as often as time allowed,  She let me plant tiny bulbs one fall–snowdrops–telling me they would be the first things to show life in the spring.  I chose to put my bulbs at the base of our adolescent magnolia tree in the back yard and in early Mlarch, I’d run out and see if there was even the tiniest show of pale green.  Again, I’d sit next to the magnolia’s sleek trunk for long stretches, perhaps hoping I’d be on site the moment first-life showed itself.  That never happened, but I loved the tree with its huge, shiny leaves and magical white blooms.

My ;third tree story happens decades after my childhood ones.  When my then-partner and I moved into our house–where I still live forty-seven years later–we enjoyed a big elm out back near the garage.  When Dutch elm disease began ravaging trees all over town, we signed up to get biannual treatments of a chemical researched at the University of Minnesota that protected injected trees from the dreaded beetles.  That tree still is in the back yard but lost a giant canopy about ten years ago in a straight-line storm.  It broke my heart to watch the caring group of men come and saw her branches into portable segments and take her away.  She now has a solid metal cord connecting her two remaining segments so storms can’t tear them off the major trunk.  My arborist and I know that the open wound means her life is ebbing, but he supports my wish not to lose this ancient tree– an Ent of my own, I like to think.

In the last decade, several germinal books have been published documenting how much trees communicate with other trees, support offspring of their own kinds, watch out for other trees that are having trouble, and, of course, keep temperatures where they exist measurably cooler as we heat our planet to dangerous levels.  The OverstoryIn Search of the Mother TreeThe Island of Missing Trees, and Entangled Lives are just a few of these fascinating works.  Whereas I used to think of trees as fundamentally different from creatures of the earth and the sea and the sky because they were stationary, I now understand that underground, trees live an active and sentient life, grounded in cooperation and community and defying Darwinian thinking based in competition and mere survival.. 

So Kilmer’s words come back to me, fresher and truer than before.  And I no longer join in judging them as  sentimental.  He wrote his lines because he had gleaned  their majesty and mystery.  We could do well to follow his lead before we clear-cut more old-growth forests, and before we destroy some of the noblest works of creation.,

The Holy Family

A while back I read an article that fascinated me and has stayed in my mind. It was about a lesbian living in Tennessee who went through the process of adopting a child. It seems that the state allows a single woman to do this but forbids a lesbian couple from doing so. This seemed so patently illogical that I read the piece several times to be sure I understood what it was saying. The author found out about this conundrum when she heard of a lesbian couple who were married and financially secure (one was a college professor and the other some kind of computer expert) were told they could not apply for adoption.

The reason, seemingly stated with no hesitation, was this: “Y’all do not mirror the Holy Family.” After recovering from loud laughter, I decided to think hard and deeply about that two-some. We have the young Mary who is engaged to Joseph, who is considerably older than she. He has assumed she is a virgin, of course, so is startled, dismayed, and confused when she tells him she is pregnant. He is not the father, she assures him. Indeed no human male is the father. An angel has visited her with a long-stemmed lily handed to her as she is told she is to be the mother of God’s only begotten son.

What is Joseph to do, I ask myself. Most men would have rejected their bride-to-be, seeing her as “damaged goods” at the very least. But Joseph carries on and they are wed. In due time, the baby boy is born and begins a relatively short life before becoming the founder of one of the world’s major religions. And things don’t end with Joseph’s good heartedness because another angel comes to warn them to flee their home because Herod will soon order his troops to find this baby and kill him. So the brand new mother packs a few necessities, I assume, and they set off, fearing to try and stay at regular sleeping places and ending up in that famous manger. The Holy Family spends time in a barn with at least one ox and one cow so they can rest before completing their journey to temporary safety.

So the Holy Family that the professional lesbian couple does not “mirror” is comprised of a woman pregnant out of wedlock, who starts life with no security or peace of mind, sheltering with her broad-minded husband in a cold outdoor place with some kindly livestock.

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