Let it Start with Me

Well, all kinds of things are winding down and ending here at Sunnyside and related places nearby. The family garden is falling asleep. The bees have dwindled. On the streets the sugar maples are turning fully red and gold. For the first time this fall I filled and hung the bird feeder out between the birch and the pine, like a lantern of nourishment. Also, I have a collection of some three dozen houseplants, some of which, during the summer, I like to keep outside. Last week, just ahead of the first hard frost, I brought the last of them in. That was my Norfolk Island Pine.

"I brought the pine in" I say, but actually, the labor is always more of an act of importation. It's huge, this thing. It's main trunk is thicker than my femur, and the whole kit and kaboodle including the pot is a good foot taller than me and weighs a good hundred pounds even with the soil dry. It's so big in fact that, to fit it back in the sun room every September, I have to cut off the crown--something that in a practical way is easy to do, but in an emotional way is very hard. You see, when you cut the crown, there's a milky substance that the plant exudes for awhile from the cut. The botanists call it latex, but it reminds me of the milk of human kindness. There's nothing to do about it though, because the ceilings are only so high in Sunnyside. It's not a castle. It's not a cathedral. It's just the home of a few ordinary citizens--a two bedroom Dutch colonial  built in 1922. So, I tell the pine that I am sorry, wait till it forgives me, then take a deep breath, grit my teeth, and cut off about a foot of the crown. I use a culinary shears for this operation, the same sort of shears you use for cutting up whole chickens. 

On the morning I brought the pine in, I told myself to take my time. It was heavy; it was ungainly. If I worked too quickly I might hurt my back or tip the plant over and damage it. So I lifted and slid it, lifted and slid it, all the way from the breezeway to the stoop, then lifted it up the steps one at a time to the red front door. As I alternated working and resting, working and resting, the neighborhood kids from across the street gathered on the corner to wait for the school bus. One of these kids, a girl, always carries a flute in its black case. She never talks to the others, whereas the others are all friends with each other and like to talk. None of them, though, were talking that morning as they watched me move the pine. I felt their gaze on me, and their attention made me work all the more carefully. I didn't want to ruin the dignity of the moment. I wanted all of them to remember the scene for awhile. It is, after all, a fairly unusual sight, worth a remark or two: Neighborhood Guy in Knitted Brown Sweater Moves Huge Potted Pine. 

Anyhow the pine stands inside the sun room now. And its presence changes the room completely, into something of a forest grove now, soft and green. In the afternoons, when I like to read some history, I sit down on a chair facing the pine to read. I can reach out and touch the soft long fingers of its needle-groups, then get back to reading about Rome or Greece or the Middle Ages or my favorite, the Renaissance. 

Folks, these days--these darkening days in the Northern Hemisphere--don't believe there's such a thing as progress anymore. Progress as we over the last century have defined it--economic growth, perpetual technical advance, growing personal comfort--is as good as finished. If we want to define for ourselves a different kind of progress, that might be fine, but don't for instance believe the economists who say things are getting better, or will bet better if we just stay the course and borrow more and engage in more spending. Things are not getting better. We're ruining the world. We're burning (literally burning) through all of nature's capital, which is the only capital that really means anything, and the only capital that keeps us alive. The oceans are broken; huge swathes of the Pacific have been rendered lifeless by indiscriminate fishing and disintegrating plastics. Our forests are being cut at a rate that can be measured in acres per second. The honeybees and wild pollinators are dying, the moose and the frogs. The whole beautiful planet is dying, and we will die with it. The only hope we have, and I mean the only hope, is to thoughtfully, purposefully, ruthlessly, painstakingly dismantle the consumption-based economy, and (piece by piece) import a sense of the cosmic economy back into our lives, finding over and over, again and again, ways of meshing our own individual homes intimately with the earth. (Bringing my pine into the house, by the way, is an active sign of this course of action; just a sign of course, nothing more; a visible sign to me of what I want to see more of in my life: a home more green in every way.)

I'd like to say there's hope, but in the first place, there's an awful lot of us human beings here on the planet, doing a number on it, and in the second place there's the problem of changing so many minds, and disestablishing so many habits of consumption. You see the trouble is, that even those of us who feel real concern are pretty much unaware of the necessary scope of change involved. It's not just a matter of donating dollars to the Nature Conservancy or of purchasing yearly carbon credits, or of eating a little more organic or of petitioning the government to invest in more wind technology and high speed rail. Least of all is it about buying things because they label themselves green and sustainable. It's about turning our basic conceptions about the good life inside out. It's about changing our habits from the ground level up. It's about turning down and turning off. It's about giving it up and doing without. It's about shutting the wallet on what doesn't make the world greener, really greener. It's about staying home and developing your imagination instead of traveling and seeing it all first hand. It's about planting and preserving. It's about prizing the human hand once more in the daily work of the home. Most of all, it's about saying, "if there is to be a start, let it start with me."

Here, if it helps, I'll say it first: 

Let it start with me. 

HB

Until Tuesday the 29th!