Reflection: “The Awe and Wonder of
Nature”©
The Rev. Sarah Lammert, USR, March
11, 2007
There I was, up to my arms in rich,
black soil. Along with five other work
study students, I was “mucking for potatoes” at the Green Gulch Zen Center
garden. This was no ordinary garden, and
these were no ordinary potatoes. The
garden was entirely organic – a supply garden for the famous “Greens”
restaurant in San Francisco. And the
potatoes weren’t Idaho baking spuds or even ordinary new potatoes – instead
they were an heirloom variety, pink in color, firm and petite. Finding them was like discovering an Easter
egg hidden for the
As we worked together in silence –
we were silent intentionally, as a part of a Buddhist retreat experience – with
the pulse of the Pacific Ocean hitting Muir Beach beyond us to lend the day a
rhythm, I felt a sort of wholeness that in my experience is rare in life. Some of you have shared similar experiences
with me, when in the presence of natural beauty, one’s heart becomes filled
with awe and wonder, and the sense that there is a self melts away, or at least
a self that is separate from everything else outside. There, in the garden, I felt whole, complete,
at peace, content, with the sun on my back, and the quiet companionship of my
fellow gardeners, and my hands calmly searching through the soft loamy earth.
A week later, back at home, I
received a postcard from a fellow guest student who had stayed for the extended
retreat option: “I’m sorry you had to
leave on Tuesday. The day after you
left, the rest of us reached enlightenment right there in the garden.”
Seven years later, I found myself
imagining the serenity of the Green Gulch garden as I stood contemplating a
rather different scene – an abandoned urban lot in downtown Ogden, Utah. It was a deep but narrow piece of land – too
narrow to build on. It had been donated
to the Women’s Center where our congregation rented on Sundays. Our congregation had been looking for a place
to start a community garden, and the Director of the Center had decided to
offer the land to us. As we carefully
picked our way through prickly weeds, rocks and broken glass, I noticed a blue
paint chip lying on the ground ---the chips were everywhere, a ghost of the
house that had once stood on this spot. I
could squint my eyes and envision a garden there, but it was going to take
something to get there.
I had no idea how much effort was
ahead of us. It turned out that this
location had at one time been a river bed, so it was filled with rocks. The paint chips contained lead. There was no water access on the lot, and it
would require tearing up the asphalt in the street to lay piping in from the
water main. Even though we got a grant
to cover most of the expenses, fencing would be very expensive, and we weren’t
sure how we would pay for that. With the
help of some very determined congregational members – one of whom was a
farmer’s daughter who had grown up in Southern Utah and was used to adverse
soil conditions, and another who had just finished a master gardening program
-- we were able to haul away the entire top two feet of suspect soil, remove
the river rocks by hand, build in composting bins, put up the fences (with a
donation from a generous congregant), build back up the soil, bring in water
piping, and build a drip irrigation system.
If you saw the garden now, you would
not be able to imagine the abandoned lot that it once was. Neighbors reserve beds in the back, while the
front of the garden is for all to share. There is a tepee structure that supports a
flowering bean plant, creating a living reading and shade room for children in
the summertime. It is a place of
brightness and beauty on an otherwise dreary and downtrodden street – a place
for people to connect, for children to experience the wonder and beauty of a
green oasis, and for families to supplement their food budgets with healthy,
abundant homegrown produce.
Rachel Bagby, a writer and singer,
wrote up a wonderful interview with her mother, a well known urban community
gardener in Philadelphia, who was by this time well into her eighties, and
still actively gardening.[1] In the
piece, she asks her mother about her work with children. Her mother talks about how much she loves to
show children the grass from the weeds and the plants, explaining how they
grow, and how everything has a cycle.
“How do you
get the children in here?” asks Rachel.
Mother: “Open
the gate and say ‘Come on children...’…The mothers say ‘Yeh, take the children
so they can sit down and look at television…’”
Daughter: “And
what kind of hope do you have?”
Mother: “You
do that with children, not all of them will end up in jail. Some of them will come out all right.”
Daughter: “Why
do you think that if you show them the living things that will help them
straighten up?”
Mother: “It
helps to appreciate the beauty of the Earth, and of nature; we call it mother
nature.”
Daughter: “Do
you think it helps them appreciate the beauty of each other and their abilities?”
Mother: “This
is the thing. If you can appreciate the Earth, you can appreciate the beauty of
yourself. If this has beauty, I too have
beauty. And if I learn to take care of
that I’ll also take care of myself and help take care of others. See, taking care of yourself and appreciating
yourself is the first step.”
It may not seem like much, in the
world today, to teach children how to garden.
What difference will it make to start a compost project at your home, or
plant a few seeds in a garden, given the enormity of the environmental ills we face? Our earth is warming up, causing massive
changes in weather patterns, and in animal and plant life. Just this week in the paper, there was a story
predicting that parts of the East Side of Manhattan and almost half of Brooklyn
might be under water within the next thirty years. My middle school-aged daughter came home
recently demanding to know what we were going to do when petroleum reserves run
out in forty years, given that everything from automobiles to our synthetic
clothing rely on this energy source.
The p
This
is not child’s play, I’m talking about – what is at stake is the very survival
of life on Earth.
Interestingly though, in a study
quoted by the Trust for Public Land, the most dedicated and activist
environmentalists attribute their commitment to a combination of two sources:
many hours spent outdoors in a keenly remembered wild or semi-wild place in
childhood or adolescence; and an adult who taught them respect for nature.[2] It turns out that what we respond to as
humans, is not a series of dire statistics about the impending death of our
world as we know it, but a direct experience of the wonder and awe of nature,
which connects us to the web of life, and inspires us to act to defend life in
its infinite variety. If as children we
can be taught firsthand to love the earth, we will grow up to see ourselves not
as separate from the natural world, but as a part of it. And as adults, we can recapture that spirit
of exploration of childhood, and we too can experience that sense of wonder and
awe, and at-one-ness with the land.
It doesn’t require a trip to the
Himalayas or the Grand Canyon to re-spark that connection to our earth
(although certainly these among the true cathedrals of our world). All it takes is putting our hand into the
rich black earth and pulling up a pink potato.
Or, stopping for a moment to admire a hawk overhead, or to notice the
way a bare winter tree branch creates a pattern against the sky. Discovering something new about what makes
things grow is a great way to spark excitement and attunement to the natural
world. I really encourage everyone to
participate in the composting action set up during the coffee hour today. You can learn about carbon/nitrogen ratios,
compost activators, and how to turn food like old coffee grounds and vegetable
peels into soil for your own gardens. It
is so cool, and it doesn’t even have to be smelly or messy or gross. And it is something you can feel proud about
– doing your part to preserve and sustain our environmental future.
What is a true mistake is to
inundate children – particularly young children -- with the whole dire picture
of where our world is going. Writer
David Sobel worries that we are creating what he calls “ecophobia” among our
children through well-intentioned curricula for elementary school aged kids
that bring home the devastation of Chernobyl, tell the story of the murder of
rainforest activist Chico Mendez, and include videos that explain how our
insatiable hunger for fast food hamburgers and oil has led to the displacement
of indigenous forest people, and caused clear cutting in the Amazon.
In teaching children such things, the
hope is that they will change their own behaviors and grow up to be organic
Vegan, hybrid-driving, rammed earth living members of the Green Party, in time
for our Earth to be saved from the disastrous course that we ourselves have set
it on. “My fear,” writes Sobel “is that
just the opposite is occurring. In our
zest for making them aware of and responsible for the world’s p
It may well be that by middle or
high school, our youth are ready to absorb and respond to the world’s grave
environmental woes. My daughter Abby,
who at nearly 12 years old considers herself an environmentalist, just wrote a
well-reasoned paper against animal testing, for instance. She is at the age of reason, perhaps just
barely able to understand issues like weighing the value of human life against
that of animals, and able to absorb some of the uglier statistics in her
research, including the fact that millions of animals die in laboratories every
year. But for younger children, such
images might just have a nightmarish effect rather than motivating them to work
for change.
Instead,
what is important is that children learn to bond with the world beyond our
human habitats, learn to love the outdoors and feel comfortable with their
hands in the dirt. As John Burroughs put
it so beautifully, “Knowledge without love will not stick. But if love comes first, knowledge is sure to
follow.”
It was the originator of the term “land
ethic,” Aldo Leopold, who noted in his Sand County Almanac in 1949 that the way
to change the heart and behavior of people towards the land is to transform Homo sapiens from “conqueror of the
land-community to plain member and citizen of it.” And this kind of change happens from the
inside out, rather than the outside in.
It is wonderful to send a check to the Sierra Club or to the World
Wildlife Fund. It is important to send
letters supporting environmental legislation, including the Kyoto Accord. It is great to watch films like Al Gore’s
Oscar winning “An Inconvenient Truth.”
But we as adults are not all that different from young children, in that
we also need awe and wonder and a love for nature to truly to transform us into
citizens of the land. We need concrete
daily acts to offer hope that change is possible. It can be as simple as feeding that bucket of
compost, or growing a jar of bean sprouts in your window. You could get a little more ambitious and use
your new soil to plant a butterfly garden in your yard. Better yet, aerospace your yard with native
plants. Bring your toxic garbage to the
Bergen County hazardous waste collection days.
Find out what your water shed is.
Get out and walk through the Celery Farm or in the woods of Sterling
Forest. Volunteer in the USR
garden. Find an empty lot and start
dreaming of a community garden filled with children learning to see beauty in themselves
by learning about beauty in plant cycles.
Dare to hope. Dare to see what is
worth saving -- this Earth that is really an extension of our own selves.
Any gardener will tell you that
preparing the soil for planting is the most important and difficult part of
growing flowers, fruits and vegetables.
When the Green Gulch gardeners first broke ground, they didn’t just
uncover that soft, rich black soil, velvety to the touch, and strewn with bejeweled
pink potatoes, twining squash vines, and tomatoes in greens, yellows and reds
deliciously waiting to be mixed with the tender salad greens for our lunch. Certainly the “Your Community Garden” of
Ogden, Utah, didn’t grow without groups of people working together, hauling
rocks in wheelbarrows, and consistently adding leaves and composting elements
to build up a weary bed of ground. The
end result, however, is joyous, beautiful, and deeply satisfying.
So, we too, might start a new
environmental life one carrot peel at a time, by literally building up soil,
and perhaps opening our selves to the natural world in a new and embodied way. If composting just isn’t your thing, check out
the display on ordering re-usable grocery bags.
My family of 4 typically could save 1000 plastic bags from being thrown
away each year simply by bringing reusable bags to the store, so this simple
act multiplied by our entire congregation quickly would save 100,000 or more
plastic bags per year!
Transformation begins in the every
day, and grows from there, like the concentric circles of a pebble thrown into
a pond. If we begin in love, we will
walk in beauty, as will our children, and unto the seventh generation. So be it.