August summons the senses. To see, to hear, to smell, to taste, to touch. All succumb to the refulgent temptations of summer at its most voluptuous. In late April, I make a clearing in time, gather seeds and seedlings and escape from the clutches of winter to stray outside and play in the dirt. I weed, turn, and till the soil to a consistency of readiness. Then I plant and water and weed some more and wait. For the past many weeks, our table has welcomed salad bowls bursting with the likes of arugola, red oak lettuce, Paris white lettuce, curly leaf lettuce, cinnamon basil, lemon basil, cilantro, dill, oregano, and finally, this very week, freshly picked, obscenely corpulent tomatoes.
Such home grown delicacies are familiar fare for those of us who also frequent this city's farmers' markets. Produce comes to us fresh from the farms of New York State, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey. If we're truly blessed, we even happen across those tiny sweet blueberries that thrive in the Down East soil of Maine or those berries that lie redolent in Mary Oliver's poem, "August."
"When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth."
(Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems)
And apples, the fruit of autumn's game plan, swell ever so surely in those orchards that quilt the landscape of Upstate New York. Of course the largest variety of this primal fruit swings restlessly in the breeze that engulfs New York City itself-the sui generis Big Apple. Surely Eve would not have paused a nanosecond if offered a morsel of this apple!
How rich is Creation! How generous is life with its diversity of forms and endless mutations to accommodate the permanence of change. How tempting it is to consider ourselves the captains of this spinning Earth ship that repeatedly makes its way around our sun.
In one of many Creation stories, we are told that " God blessed [humankind], and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.'" How easy it is to hear this as an all-out mandate for humankind to stand tall atop a grand hierarchy of earth's flora, fauna, wildlife, and the elemental media that spawn them. Wallace Stegner, the late 20th-century writer and environmentalist, offers an alternative response to this passage from Genesis:
"Our sanction to be a weed species living at the expense of every other species and of the earth itself can be found in [this] injunction God gave to newly created Adam and Eve. Whether or not God meant it in quite that way, and whether or not men translated Him correctly, many used these words as justification to make the earth serve human purposes alone. But what we are working toward, what with luck we may eventually attain to, is an outlook that was frequently and sometimes eloquently expressed by the first inhabitants of this continent..[a focus on] the web of life, the interconnectedness of land and man and creature."
(Wallace Stegner, "A Capsule History of Conservation" in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs)
Does this sound familiar? That interconnected web of all existence. Perhaps it is not domination of which Genesis speaks. Perhaps it is of accountability, responsibility, that goes with the consciousness we humans presumably have.
Genesis also tells us that we are creatures of the earth. It is from earth we came and to earth that we shall return. (Genesis 2:7, 3:19) The "ground of our being" is a phrase we can take quite literally. We do belong to the earth, and that which we do to the earth we do to ourselves.
We are touched by the earth and more. So how is it that, with our relative free will, we choose to touch the earth?
You and I can name countless ways in which we have violated our homeland-consuming as we do irreplaceable fossil fuels, tampering with the water table by building cities where none should exist, killing wildlife beyond our need for sustenance, dominating, subduing, provoking the prospect that earth, in its own good time, will echo the consequences of our egos gone awry.
How we have violated our human role of accountability when we have scorched the earth and our fellow creatures time and again through acts of war, through acts of vengeance when our imaginations shut down to a multitude of other options! How can we forget that on this day 55 years ago, this country, our country, dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima? By December of 1945 it was estimated that 140,000 of our fellow creatures had perished from the horrors of acute radiation. (from the records of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum)
An eyewitness account was given by a middle school student who was in a classroom at the time of the bombing.
"I'll never forget that day. After we finished our morning greetings in the schoolyard, we were waiting in the classroom. Suddenly a friend by the window shouted 'B-29!' At the same instant, a flash pierced my eyes. The entire building collapsed at once and we were trapped underneath.Cuts on my face and hands throbbed with pain. My front teeth were broken and my shirt soaked in blood. As I crawled along, encouraging myself, I somehow managed to poke my head out of the wreckage. The schoolhad vanished and only smoldering ruins remained. Beyond the school toward the center of town, all I could see was a sea of flames. I was so terrified I couldn't stop shaking. Moving my body a little at a time, I was finally able to work free of the collapsed structure. . I made my way staggering haphazardly through the rubble of the city and escaped."
(from the records of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum)
Only three days later, on August 9, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb, on the city of Nagasaki. Seventy-five thousand more men, women, and children perished-with an equal number suffering lifelong radiation effects. Trees withered; roof tiles melted; stones cracked.
Yes, the war with Japan was over on August 15, 1945, but how ready we are to name cause and effect. At what price that peace? How is it, given the exponential power of today's nuclear weapons, that we have not learned the ways of mutuality? How is it that our nation has not yet signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty? By what reasoning do we hesitate even for an instant?
What does it take to summon within us reverence for life? What does it take to teach us a gentle touch?
As Stegner called to our attention, " what with luck we may eventually attain to, is an outlook expressed by the first inhabitants of this continent." Among the first inhabitants of this continent are members of the Ute Nation of North America, who would learn earth's lessons:
"Earth teach me caring
as parents who secure their young."
Earth teach me limitation
as the ant which crawls on the ground.
Earth teach me to remember kindness
as dry fields weep with rain."
How might we learn from our place of habitation? How might we listen and watch and tread lightly on this resilient yet fragile surface of our biosphere? Is Eden lost altogether, or is its promise nascent within each of us? We consider this promise and our relationships with our fellow creatures as we take our first steps, our very first steps. Naturalist Stephen Trimble says more:
"Tiny humans begin their journeys in the haven of family-a safe place, we hope. They test their wills against the giants, the grown-ups, as they struggle to define unique relationships to the world. Each moves from there into the land, adventuring.
The natural world does not judge. It exists.
[It] enfolds [us] in storm or warm sun, in the glory of light filtering through the canopy of deep woods, or in the eddying flow of rivers-without regard for whether we say the right words, wear the right clothes, or believe the right dogma. We are simply human beings setting out into the sanctuary of fields, woods, desert."
(Stephen Trimble, "The Scripture of Maps, the Names of Trees," in The Geography of Childhood)
"the sanctuary of fields, woods, desert." This earth on which we find ourselves for such a short breath of its long life is indeed a sanctuary. It is sacred space rendered as a miracle of Creation. It is a miniscule fragment of Creation, and yet it is our choice to know it and nurture it as an Eden.
Here we hover, kin to the myth of humankind's stature in the hierarchy of life, humbled by the realities of what has been rendered through that myth, bearers of the possibility that we might heed the "spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature." Such teachings are the fifth source of the living tradition we share as Unitarian Universalists.
Morning has broken. Let us not break the morning. Let us touch the earth with reverence and know that we touch ourselves. Let us dig our toes in the sand, bask in the summer sun, relish the harvest of those seeds we have planted and the produce of those seeds placed by the wind itself. Let us refresh in the cool waters of lakes, exult in the ebb and flow of oceans, take into our mouths the succulence of summer fruit and into our nostrils the redolence of summer itself.
"The way I go is
marriage to this place,
grace beyond chance,
love's braided dance
covering the world."
(from Wendell Berry's "In Rain")
Let us go forth worthy of this earth of which we are made, celebrating in all mindfulness the miracle of it all. Amen. Copyright AllSouls 2000.
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