craving grace

Totally immersed in a wild plantation, surrounded by like-minded humans and animals, where my greatest amusement comes from listening to a chorus of frogs drown out the murmur of guests on a dark night, I'm so removed from my other reality. It's easy to ignore the news. Too easy, in fact, I have no idea what's going on in the world right now. The people I meet are at least willing to listen and accept our way of life for a few days. Then what? I spend so many nights imagining the rest of my life-- the causes I will be dedicated to, the people I could help, the policies I will fight. And the more I think, the more I see a huge wall building itself in front of my dreams.

All the people in the West who don't want to hear my logic, who don't care about people they haven't met, who still--and will always-- think of the earth as their private property (and will sue anyone who says otherwise), they terrify me. In this pseudo-utopia, I can barely hear their flimsy rhetoric anymore, but I fear it. I don't want to be trampled, abused and ultimately a failure in my cause. Even some of the adventurous travelers I meet here are skeptical about something as simple as organic food. How deep into our psyches have the corporations penetrated? "That's all nice, but how will organic agriculture feed the world's population?" they ask. How can it not? Do we have a choice? How long can the world's population deign to be fed by the industrial food chain-- based firmly in a dwindling and pathetically unreliable resource (petroleum)?

Family and friends-- please do me a favor. Save some of the world's biodiversity in your backyards. Start a garden. Grow heirloom varieties and plant crops people tell you don't grow here. Get to know your soil. Get your hands dirty. Watch the stars instead of television. Buy food from local farmers who grow their produce organically. Be aware of where your dollars go.

Sometimes the state of the world feels so urgent-- so desperate! But people wiser than me have written wise words for stressed out individuals like myself. Here are a few of them:

"Little by little, our cultivated plant species and varieties are disappearing from our orchards, kitchen gardens and fields, to be replaced by a few productive varieties which are often insipid. Will such extinction be as severe as that of the wild species? Maybe not-- there will always be some relentless individuals who hold on zealously to their grandfathers' apple trees and grandmothers' onions. In the human world, eradication is seldom complete if we remain watchful. For what is rare is dear and becomes sought after...Just as with war, so it is with plants-- in case of an invasion there are always pockets of survival. When the barbarians demolished the Roman Empire, Christianity survived in the Irish, Scottish and Byzantine monasteries, and when peace returned, these islets blossomed and spread throughout Europe...

We have chosen to break our alliance with the majority of the cultivated plant species, but this rupture has not been all-encompassing; many gardeners and farmers have kept the faith and in the depths of their conscience have remained united with the earth... The abandonment of our cultivated plants is only temporary; it is a step in our development where we sought to banish Nature to test ourselves, later to experience the joy of seeing her gallop towards us again."

~Claude Bourguignon "Regenerating the Soil"

"The closest my heart has come to breaking lately was on the day my little girl arrived home from school and ran to me, her face tense with expectation, asking, 'Are they still having that war in Afghanistan?'

As if the world were such a place that in one afternoon, while kindergarteners were working hard to master the letter L, it would decide to lay down its arms. I tried to keep the tears out of my eyes. I told her I was sorry, yes, they were still having a war.

She said, 'If people are just going to keep doing that, I wish I'd never been born.'

I sat on the floor and held her tightly to keep my own spirit from draining through the soles of my feet. I don't know what other mothers say at such moments; I suppose some promise that only the bad men are getting hurt. I wish I could believe in that story myself. But my children have never been people I could lie to. My best revenge against all the dishonesty and hatred in the world, it seems to me, will be to raise right up through the middle of it these honest and loving children."

~Barbara Kingsolver "Small Wonder"