I awake on Saturday with anticipation. Two seasoned practitioners of the annual Global Earth Exchange are going to meet me to make beauty in a wounded local place as part of the tradition begun by Trebbe Johnson, founder of Radical Joy for Hard Times. You can learn about her, the organization and GEX here. https://radicaljoy.org/global-earth-exchange/
You can learn about my own journey with giving beauty back to wounded places here. I began calling the practice Making Artful Prayers and I do it now with some regularity – almost every new moon and sometimes the full moon as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TiTs-0c3Ww&t=18s
Saturday dawns bright and sunny. No, wait a moment, it is cloudy and cool. No, there comes the sun, sweeping the yard with brilliance, making the peonies glow. Uh oh – here comes the rain. Our Pacific Northwest weather has been fickle lately, so we three women don’t even think about cancelling our meet up.
Our destination this time – a shade mitigation project to allow the neighboring grapes to grow more abundantly. Shade mitigation a euphemism for clear cutting a 100 mature trees sequestering a good amount of carbon, contributing to water retention, providing habitat for countless lives, holding the hillside in place…and yet, and yet. The vineyard was planted when the trees were small. No problem then, but 35 years later they tower and provide shade in the late, hot summer afternoons – cooling the ecosystem – which is good – but hiding the sun from the vines – which is bad. A conundrum of our times. How do we honor the needs of all life at the same time we honor the needs of the local farmer, who in this case tends to her small organic vineyard and vegetable fields with great care and with few mechanized farming methods.
As we walk up to the clear cut, we immediately recoil from the devastation, but wait, we also see nature sprouting green between the wood shards, disturbed soil, and lopped off stumps. We also soon see carefully planted by human hands, the hands of the food forest people who tend this acreage, new berry bearing shrubs along with several trees. These humans with best intentions had still forgotten to think 50 years ahead.
So we three see immediately many sides to this situation and are concentrating so hard on what lies before us that we have forgotten the wildly shifting skies above us. A wet spatter hits my glasses. A friend yelps, “Oh, noooooo. It’s raining.” I say smugly, but wrongly it turns out, “It’ll pass before we know it.” Looking up, the clouds are grimly dark. The rain begins sluicing down. “Let’s move quickly,” someone says. I happen to be standing next to a knee high, 3 feet wide, flat stump. ”Look at this blank canvas,” I say. Another says, “And the rain is already changing its color. So beautiful. It’s glowing orange.”
Rain becomes a deluge – truly a torrent. Our friend with no raincoat is drenched rapidly to the skin, but she joyfully shrugs it off. “As a kid, I used to love being out in the rain with no protection. Loved getting sopped. I’ll be ok…as long as we work fast.”
No time for “serious” prayer, spontaneous song, a poem or story. We get right to work making our Rad Joy Bird. Remember those peonies I mentioned – many of the heads were dropping their petals so I gathered them up and brought them in containers – red, rose, pink and white. I also gathered inch wide, five petaled, white flower “faces” from the lawn. I had anticipated laying them out one by one in some fashion but that was not to be. Their container floods quickly and all those little flowers glue themselves together. We use them in clumps to outline our bird. Kathryn has brought cornmeal. We use that as the sun. We simultaneously know our Rad Joy Bird is bringing new light to human consciousness. We’re asking forgiveness for our loss of connection with the land that provides for our lives.
One of the women observes wisely and says something like, “Spirit is giving us this deluge to flush out our old ways, washing us clean to begin anew. All this fresh water makes the new green growth possible, too.”
Then it hails, truly it hails: little balls of white jumping on our sleeves, messing with our hair, adorning our bird. We continue working rapidly as our backs begin feeling the chill, our soaked hands behave clumsily, my fingers having a harder and harder time picking up the fragile petals. We flow, few words are required. We trust each other’s choices. I experience the effervescent joy of co-creating. Though the complexities and paradoxes of our era remain, I imagine all of our hearts are feeling lighter as we head back to our cars.
The Wisdom of Not Knowing Everything 