Grow Towards Growing
'These are real creatures with real lives. I can’t pretend they’re not there.'
Hello, readers!
It is definitely July here in the Mountain West. Temperatures climbed into the triple digits this weekend. I spent Saturday working in the garden, dripping with sweat and feeling frustrated with my efforts. I’m currently trying to figure out the needs and strengths of a new garden, which is always a slow journey. (How’s the soil health? Where are we getting the best sun? Which plants need moved? etc.) I always feel privileged to get to have a garden. It’s not just a fun project—it often provides opportunities to help feed our family. But I’ve never had a garden year in which everything goes according to plan. Perhaps you can relate.
For those who are new to Granola: this summer, we are reading through Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and committing to an outdoor challenge that encourages us all to slow down, step outside, and pay attention. I am hoping we might work on two chapters this week, if you all are up for it.
The first reading, Chapter 7, is all about spring: the surprises of its busy clamor, the beauty of birdsong, and the slow, incremental process of life accumulation that characterizes an aging, lively world. Species evolve over time. Trees stretch outward and upward. Layers of life amass under our feet. Ponds don’t stay ponds; they grow into swamps or wetlands, then into marshes, and then into meadows. Dillard notices this pattern of accumulation, of life growing into more life, all throughout the patterns and habits of spring. “[T]he world turns upon growing, grows towards growing, and growing green and clean.”
It is worth considering how, in the age of the Anthropocene, we’ve subverted or challenged these characteristic rhythms. Many of the products, habits, and constructions we humans foster seem not to feed life, but to destroy it. We no longer “grow toward growing.” Our built environment is often hostile to life, human and nonhuman. I’m thinking here of Chris Arnade’s documentation of bus stops that are antagonistic to human comfort or safety. Or of cities that are increasingly dangerous to walkers, leading to an alarming uptick in pedestrian deaths. Then there’s the impact our cars have on insect life, and the consequences of herbicide and pesticide usage on birds. A chapter that so carefully notes the messy liveliness of nature draws attention to our own modern discomfort with that messiness and liveliness. And at what cost? The only accumulation that’s still socially acceptable to us moderns, it seems, is the accumulation of waste: disposed of at landfills out of sight and out of mind, where we won’t grow too uncomfortable with our habits of profligacy and pollution.
Perhaps this is why Dillard returns, over and over again, to the microscope. “These are real creatures with real lives,” she writes. “I can’t pretend they’re not there.”
What forms of life—vulnerable, needy, extravagant, annoying—do we prefer not to notice? To overlook? To spray? To abandon? Because if we truly looked at them, we would have to change our selves in response?
In the next 4-5 days, read Chapter 7: Spring (pages 105-123 in my edition). Consider the following questions as you read:
What do you think of Dillard’s classification of beauty as another language “to which we have no key”? How do you generally think about or notice beauty in the world around you?
Do you know the ecological history of your landscape? If so, how has that that landscape been impacted by slow growth and patterns of ecological accumulation? How has it been harmed, perhaps, by patterns of waste or pollution?
Dillard determines to look through the microscope at infinitesimal pond creatures, even if and when it makes her uncomfortable. Is there a similar form of hospitality that you might need to adopt in your own life?
This week’s outdoor challenge: spend 2-3 hours outside this week—and try to spend some of that time watching and listening to the birds! Consider Dillard’s passage on birdsong from pages 107–108:
“We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing. … [But] it does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formulae for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?”