Earth Day Awareness
by Deb Palmer George
When I first saw this little plant growing in a glove on the side of the road, I was enchanted. I insisted to my husband that we turn around to take a picture. He was also taken by the sight and we headed back to the spot chuckling along the way about the classic line, “life will find a way” from the movie Jurassic Park.
If there was ever an example of life finding a way it was this tender young plant (please don’t call it a weed) growing in a spot of dirt in a glove. Metaphors began to flow. I thought of the tenderness and resilience of earth and how it’s in our hands to care for earth. I thought about our own tenderness and resilience dealing with COVID-19 and the healing and helping hands supporting us all through this crisis. Truly, I was romanticizing, waxing poetic at the scene.
Until I realized what it really was. It was a carelessly discarded, intentionally or not, rubber glove that will never biodegrade. It was a tender bit of life, a green plant whose photosynthesis is essential to our living system. However this plant will not survive because it’s roots can’t grow. It was a construction glove not far from the site of a massive construction project near our home in Florida. These realities existed before COVD-19 and unless we are intentional about our emergence from this time, we will go right back to treating the earth the way we did before. Only that’s not how living systems work.
Health living systems have lifecycles and seasons. Even here in Florida, I’ve noticed differences in the seasons. Coming from upstate New York, I feared I’d lost the seasons but they are here in their own form serving their essential function. Life is motion and it needs all of its seasons and stages to be viable. We are in a cycle of dormancy right now. Individually and collectively turning our resources inward to survive and sustain against a pandemic. Like the plants that go dormant, even underground in the winter, we are retreated into a period of slowed growth while we generate the safety, resources and energy needed to emerge from dormancy.
The challenge is that many of us are talking about “getting back to normal.” Living things don’t work that way. The rose bush doesn’t seek last year’s buds, it takes in nourishment that allows this year’s buds to bloom. Birds don’t fly around looking for the chicks that flew away last season, they build a nest and give birth to new babies. They may return to the same area for nesting but they focus on the life that is and is to come, not trying to recreate what was before. There is a lesson for us in this.
It is time for us to be intentional and accountable about what we carry forward as we emerge. We must also consider what needs to be released. Releasing is essential because we have to create space for the possibilities and growth ahead. This Earth Day is an invitation to reflect in our own lives and as a society on how we interact with creation. There is no one right answer, everyone can’t do everything, but we can all do something. Perhaps we can pause and consider how we can each tread more softly upon the earth. As the COVID-19 pandemic has made us so aware of the air that we breathe around us, can we consider what we put into the air, the water, and the ground. Can we give our plants a chance to take root so they can create the oxygen we need to breath? Can we emerge from this pandemic having healed our connection with all creation? Can we use this time to remember that no one rich enough or powerful enough to stop a hurricane, an earthquake or tornado. But we are powerful enough to take only what we need with the least impact and to ensure that we never take for ourselves what we would deny to another. Because to be sure, all around this tender, resilient earth, we are all absolutely equal in our tender humanity.
