EACH BLADE OF GRASS
Sunday, Feb. 9, 2020
Original thought, like original sin I suppose, must begin somewhere.
Something causes it to spring forth, like winter wheat germinating before the snow is gone.
A sprout of something, poking through morning haze – fresh, green, alive, unspoiled, and unfettered.
Dry grass and snow, patch-worked park I see every morning.
Dormant, dead, dreary.
Beneath, ingredients poised to create another spring, like 16 billion season changes (earth is least 4 billion years old) have come before.
That’s a lot of climate change.
The historical records, according to scientists, have witnessed warming periods, cooling periods, and robust ice ages lasting millions of years.
We are currently fussed about who is right or wrong, describing what is happening now.
Few question the sun, earth’s orbit or seasons – because they’ve never failed to exist.
Those who debate climate focus on what humans have done, are doing and might do in the future.
Those on extreme ends of this argument spectrum blame so many things man has done poorly over less than a century – some of it extremely harmful, damaging, and irreversible.
Most citizens of most countries are involved in herculean changes in their lives to consume less, damage less, and generally take better care of the environment; some would argue it is too little too late.
Experts argue which is cause, and which is the effect.
In time we’ll understand it all better, but for now, we seem to need someone to blame, someone to persuade or coerce into changed behavior. I don’t know if logic or science prove the case one way or the other. Still, I believe we are getting a better sense of what drives us, individually and as a society, to do things – and raises interesting questions of why we vilify people without due process and investigation. We mock behavior and rationale which is not our own. We rail against policies and processes which are not our own.
We do all this, and I must ask why?
Are we in need of help, or of hope? Are we helpless, or just feeling voiceless? If we aren’t being heard, we have three choices; we can go silent, we can yell louder, or we change what we do to be non-verbal.
That blade of grass poised to come up between last year’s dead matted mess on the valley floor will be nourished by the melting snow and ice, the soil in which it is rooted will warm up because the sun causes it. Soil, sun, and blade of grass cannot hear the news hype or protest march – they don’t read policy or laws, they simply exist and persist.
Human animals differ from all other creatures – not just in brain size, but in brain capacity.
We have created utopia by any historical standard, yet we don’t have enough. Our appetite for learning, knowing, and understanding is inexorably outmuscled by our desire for consumption.
In food, in prosperity, in things.
In peace and trade.
In science, in health, in art, in public discourse, and in the ubiquitous need to stand in our places or on our soapboxes believing we are right, we are of sound mind and sound body – and somebody should be listening to us. The loudest and most outrageous – on either end of the spectrum – get our ear, get our attention, and get us motivated toward some form of action. Why is that?
One blade of grass can’t hear the debate, doesn’t have a viewpoint – it just grows, turns toward the sun, and flourishes here.
As we have. As long as we allow each blade of grass to flourish, life will continue.
Each blade of grass is not a metaphor for life – it is a guide for life.
Life as we know it.
And life as we expect to experience it in the future.
Would you rather walk a path of inanimate concrete, or on a grassy one wanting wear?
Reader feedback:
It is sadly interesting how our fear of this epidemic has exposed much racism festering beneath a thin veneer of civility, RH, Calgary, AB from Bradenton, FL
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