Weeds In the Garden

The rains were generous; the weeds gruesome! 

In fact, they grew so much they ate a table that was under the clothes line. Came right up over the sides and made it disappear! In fair weather, that table is convenient for putting the basket of clean clothes on while we hang them up to dry. I wanted to free the table AND to get rid of the sticker-ball-burr plants with their innocent looking yellow flowers. So I went to work Sunday. Hah! 

Last year, I was too late in pulling the tenacious and evil plants out, and their ripe brown burrs scattered everywhere. When the rains came the sticker-ball-burrs proliferated. This year, I hope I may have been in time. The burrs are green. Hopefully, they’re too immature to reproduce. Each year at our newish home is a little better. Next step after weed eradication is to plant a real and proper vegetable garden!

I heard that placing overlapping cardboard on the weeds and covering it with a layer of mulch or hay suppresses the unwanted plants. This tactic worked in the one quadrant where I tried it. Only a few strands of an unwanted vine came up where the boxes were gapping. Sunlight must’ve seeped in and pulled the foliage upward. Metaphors grow in the garden also. So does hope.

There’s an old story about a child walking on the beach after a storm and coming across hundreds of stranded sea-stars. She immediately begins flinging them, one at a time, back into the sea. An old man approaching her sees what she’s doing and tells her she’ll never be able to save all the starfish. She picks up another and throws it beyond the waves chanting, “Made a difference to that one, made a difference to that one.”

My generation thought we could solve the world’s problems and we set about turning our country toward peace and away from war and segregation. On so many courthouse steps and in board of education hallways I sat to demonstrate the injustices that were being perpetrated in my city. So many rivers of people I joined in marching to protest the war in Viet Nam. We thought we’d made our point. We thought we made a difference. How did we end up here in the land of bigotry, xenophobia, and differentism? Again.

The rising up of young students nation wide after the most recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida inspires me. They see past the occluded vision of their elders. We have become those occluded elders or else we would've seen and hacked the path forward. Again.

They see the disproportionate number of young black men being shot dead and say CUT THE BS. They see past the illogical propaganda of the NRA and say CUT THE BS. They see past the flawed argument of putting more guns in schools to protect them while they’re trying to study and say CUT THE BS. 

We must honor these students. Their eyes are open. Ours have been shut for years. Our blind leadership has gotten us all into some very precarious positions. We’re close to tipping the balance of the our planet’s ecology toward certain annihilation and we can’t even agree to work together to set things right.

Those sticker-ball-burrs in my garden remind me that sometimes offal must be picked up one turd at a time. Just as we must save sea stars or people who’ve slipped through the cracks ONE AT A TIME, so too must we weed out hatred and bigotry and obscene use of force on a case by case basis. Listen to the bigot, the hater, the traumatized cop who is reacting to his own terror or history of hate rather than responding to the actual situation before him. Hear him out. Meet him where he is and talk him back from the farthest fringey edge and back into the fold of sanity where the human family can care for each of its members. 

All of us have been sticker-ball-burrs at some point during our years, weeks and days on the planet. All of us get prickly from time to time. How lucky most of us have been to have some loving presence talk us down from doing harm to ourselves or to others by our hateful speech or hurtful behavior. The ones who’ve not been lucky, the ones who’ve been brainwashed to think that hurting others is a good idea, or who’ve been so traumatized by life that they concluded on their own that striking out was the only balm, must be stopped and brought back systematically into the fold of human kind. 

Now, I’m not saying that laying a sheet of cardboard over them will solve the problem of hate growing in the Garden, but I am encouraging us to listen to the young people who see the problem clearly and have some really good ideas on how to proceed.

May sanity and peace prevail.

 One sticker-ball-burr at a time...