Teach
Your Children
“May
I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe—tiny but useful. May I stay
forever in the stream. May I look down upon the wind flower and the bull
thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.”
Mary
Oliver (reprinted in Parabola, Spring 2022; p.13; original copyright 2016)
My
friends and I have talked a lot lately about what we can do to hold the center,
since the center, at least in America and likely in the rest of the world,
seems wobbly to us. What it has come down to is this: to do what we can to
teach the children what is precious about this blue-green spaceship they live
on. As Mary Oliver says, “Give them the fields and the woods and the
possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit.”
There
is a little clump of Wax Mallow growing beside my driveway. I don’t know where
it came from and understand (after googling) that it is an invasive species
that jumped from its hothouse confines to our garden walls. It is a relative
of the hibiscus and has little Japanese lantern flowers—bright red and pleated.
I love it so much. It blooms all summer long and every time I pull into my driveway,
I pay homage to it. Mary Oliver says, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
If in
fact, attention is the beginning of devotion, perhaps we could pay more
attention to the things that we love that grow right around us. I love crepe
myrtles, and dogwoods and I love seeing the jonquil stalks sticking through the
cold, winter ground. I love wild plants like dusty miller and sassafras and cedar
with berries that crush and smell heavenly. I remember the bay laurel that grew
along the cliffs on Block Island, the wonderful scent of bay berries and ocean
spray. And the desert sage that scented the air around Santa Fe.
This continent, this
world, is full of incredible things—plants and animals and fish and sea mammals
and birds of every color and size. Teach your children about them. If they learn to love
them even from a distance, perhaps it will be the beginning of devotion to diverse
life on planet Earth. And maybe that devotion will turn into conservation and
preservation and joy.
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment