Life Lessons from a Pest Plant

Guests at the World Healing Institute at Cobb Island Station, on Virginia's beautiful eastern shore helped launch the first-ever Radical Joy for Hard Times retreat on June 19-21. It was a particularly diverse and inquisitive group, composed of two Methodist ministers, an architect, a biologist, an artist, and WHI center coordinator Annie Hess.

Plans for the weekend included a walk on Sunday with a biologist to visit and perhaps do ceremony on a stretch of endangered beach. However, on Saturday our attention was repeatedly drawn to an environmental problem closer at hand. This was the common reed that grew abundantly between the institute's front lawn and the bay. Phragmites (frag might eez) has become a reviled plant along the eastern shore, even though it grows on spoils, such as dredged land, where no other plants can survive. The Nature Conservancy, which owns the land at WHI, has tried repeatedly to poison it, but it keeps coming stubbornly back.

The mission of Radical Joy for Hard Times is to bring attention and beauty to wounded places. Gradually our group came to realize that phragmites itself is one of nature's wounded. We discussed the plant at length, getting the facts about how it grows and where, then each person spent an hour sitting alone among these tall grasses with their round stalks and sandpapery leaves. Afterwards, everyone came together to tell the story of what had happened. All the comments were striking in their individuality and in the precision of the way observations of the plant all around had dovetailed with inner experiences and reflections. I was particularly moved by what one of the ministers had to say:

"I was thinking about inclusivity and exclusivity. There's a movement in our church these days to exclude gay people from worship services. I think this is wrong. Everyone should have a right to worship God and His creation. And every plant should have a right to grow, because it, too is a part of creation."

As in any Radical Joy for Hard Times event, we ended this excursion with an Act of Beauty. This one had two parts. First we all made a path through a long stretch of phragmites, a kind of meandering ramble that might serve as a counterpart to the beautiful Chartres-style labyrinth cut into the grass between the building and the (phragmite-lined) bay. Finally, when the path was complete, we cut stalks of phragmites, arranged them in a glass vase, and placed them on our dinner table.

Parallel Pilgrimages

On April 25, from 10:00 to 11:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time, eleven people from western California to London, England went to places that had been ecologically damaged and did a short vigil there.

The point of this pilgrimage was simply to be present in a place that is usually avoided: those waste places or generators of waste, those hidden places under bridges or behind industrial sites. Where we chose to go ranged from a coal plant in Colorado to a quarry in upstate New York, from a beach in California to a bay filled with lovely, bobbing boats in Annapolis, Maryland.

A few days later, we checked in with one another via a telephone conference call. The woman who visited the coal plant said she was surprised by her own reaction. She had expected to feel despair as she contemplated how this gigantic generator of energy was poisoning the land and air. Instead, considering the town’s recycling plant, which is situated right across the street, she was struck by the ways that we humans are at least making an effort to clean up our messes and change our ways. The man who visited the California beach with three of his friends said that by the end of the hour, the place had become so personalized to each of them that they didn’t want to leave.

I myself sat by the Susquehanna River, nine miles from my home in northeastern Pennsylvania. In 2005 the Susquehanna was designated the Most Endangered River in America. Where I live, about fifty miles from the river’s source in Cooperstown, NY, it is relatively clear. Mallards were swimming peaceably, and several Canada geese came in for a landing. But, like so much of the wounded environment all over the world, the damage remains largely hidden. As the Susquehanna continues along its path, past Binghamton, Scranton, and Harrisburg, it picks up industrial, farm, and domestic waste and pollutants and is filled with toxins by the time it empties into Chesapeake Bay.

At the end of the hour, I made an altar to the Susquehanna using trash washed up in one area. The altar was inspired by a small cloth doll covered in sand and mud and that happened to be made of eco-green felt. It now stands on a piece of driftwood: the beaming Guardian of the Susquehanna River.

When we step outside the boundaries of the familiar, we are amazed at what we encounter. As one of the pilgrims said of her experience the other day, “Now I want to visit more wounded places to see what they have to tell me.”

Playing In Traffic

A friend of mine who lives in Boulder, Colorado recently bought a small house in a new neighborhood. Shortly after Mary and her two daughters moved in, they had a rude awakening. It turns out they are much closer to the freeway than Mary had realized when she was first looking at the house, and now she can hear the distant hum of the traffic all the time.

She has thought a lot about how to deal with this situation. In moments of extreme frustration, she has considered moving. Yet she likes the house and the neighborhood, and she finally has enough space for a garden. She’s shared her concern with her neighbors. One woman told her that she tries to ignore the noise and pretend it’s the sound of the sea, and she advised my friend to do the same. “But this is Colorado!” Mary exclaimed. “The sea is nowhere near here.”

Instead she has chosen a third alternative: she is exploring ways to live with the situation. When she gets distressed by that relentless assault on her stillness, she adjusts her thinking and considers what the noise says about the society we live in—how insistent we Americans are on our right to be mobile, how constant is the outpouring of carbon gases into the atmosphere.

Consequently, she is also adapting her behavior. She has started riding a bike wherever she goes, so she herself does not contribute to the problem. As she works in her small yard, she focuses on paying mindful attention to the beauty there instead of feeling that it is sullied by the noise.

Mary’s approach to living peacefully with the stream of traffic is a model for how we can live in a mindful, soulful way with many of the environmental problems that surround, challenge, and frustrate us. We can’t fix everything. Sometimes we must learn to co-exist. One way of doing so is simply to acknowledge what is happening and refuse either to turn our backs on it in denial or confront it in rage. We can love the nature that is before us and allow ourselves to be captivated by its persistent thriving. We can devote attention and discussion to determining how we want to be in relation to our changing Earth. And wherever we go we can look for—and find—beauty on that Earth.

The Uninvited Fairy

Remember the thirteenth fairy in the story of Sleeping Beauty? At the christening of the baby princess, Brier Rose, twelve gold plates were set out for twelve fairies in the realm, but the queen and king forgot to invite the thirteenth fairy. The forgotten fairy showed up anyway and proclaimed a vengeful promise: before the girl’s sixteenth birthday, she would prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die. Horrified, one of the other fairies lightened the curse: the girl would fall asleep until a prince came to kiss her awake.

That thirteenth fairy refused to be forgotten. She would have her say. She would make sure she received her due honor, just like the other fairies.

The damaged places of the Earth are like that uninvited fairy. We try to forget them, but we can’t. Our hearts ache when we hear about animals dying because they can no longer find food. Our sense of beauty is assaulted when we confront clearcut forests. Outrage floods us when we read about toxic debris from mountaintop mining cascading down hillsides to clog valleys and streams and turn people out of their homes. Because the state of the planet pains us, many of us just try to ignore it.

But those places keep hovering in our awareness, just like that forgotten fairy. They remind us that all is not well in the land. They force us to consider what kind of world we’ll be leaving to our grandchildren. And they remain a part of us. We loved them once and we cannot now forget them, even though they are damaged.

After Brier Rose pricked her finger on the spindle she fell asleep, along with all the people in the realm. During the scores of years of collective unconsciousness that followed, many princes tried to make their way through the thickets that surrounded the palace to rescue her. Yet it was not until one particular prince, motivated by love, determined and persistent, managed the difficult journey and kissed her gently that Sleeping Beauty awoke.

Radical Joy for Hard Times recognizes that our neglected lands, waters, and communities are part of the whole living Earth. They demand restitution—not just with projects to restore them in measurable ways, but also with acts and attitudes that acknowledge that they are part of the whole community of the living Earth. In other words, the future of global ecology requires a kiss! We must forgive one another for our previous neglect of the earth, and we must reawaken those damaged places with acceptance, love, and beauty.

Then no part of the Earth will be left out of the story.

Prayers for Beauty in Hard Times

When I was a child growing up in the Episcopal church, I never understood the iconography of Jesus dying on the cross. To me it was a morbid image, and I stopped going to church in my early teens.

As an adult pondering the intersection between despair and beauty, however, I have come to see that this dominant image of Christianity does what Radical Joy for Hard Times does: it invites us to ponder for a while what is painful and sorrowful, that our hearts may be opened to love and compassion.

Therefore, when my friend Liz Maxwell, a rector at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles in New York City, invited me to lead a Radical Joy for Hard Times program for Lent, I accepted eagerly. Last Saturday, March 14, a small group of participants gathered in a little chapel just off the main sanctuary of this church, which is transformed five days a week into soup kitchen that has been operating for thirty years and now serves meals to 1,200 guests a day. Today, we sat in a circle as sun wafted through the stained glass windows and people talked about personal concerns in their own lives and about their wider concerns for oppressed peoples, damaged places, sick friends, and the ravages of the economic crisis.

Grief opens us up to compassion. As the Sufis, the mystical sect of Islam say, when your heart is broken, there is space for God to move through the cracks. The liturgical season of Lent, when Jesus died, precedes Easter, the springtime celebration of new life and shared joy. Suffering heightens our perception, too. In a state of sorrow, we perceive beauty with extra clarity, whether it is the beauty of nature determined to thrive or the generous act of another person— friend or stranger.

Our group witnessed beauty thriving when we went outside to the church’s small garden, right at the intersection of two busy streets in Chelsea. Crocus and daffodil buds struggled up through the hard soil, despite scraps of litter that had blown in during the winter. Birds sang in the trees, their songs muffling the noise of traffic. We concluded the gathering by writing prayers on white ribbons and tying them to the tree in the garden.

Many people are afraid to tap the well of sorrow that pervades life on earth. Why bother, we ask? What can any one individual do? And yet, merely by willing to see what is true and, even better, then to share that with others, we touch the reality of humanity. That simple act can infuse us with the determination to see more beauty and to act with more compassion.

Cross Bones Graveyard

The goal of Radical Joy for Hard Times is to bring beauty to orphaned places, that they may once again become part of the cycle of life. The story of Cross Bones Graveyard http://www.crossbones.org.uk in southeast London is a remarkable example of how giving that kind of attention to a place and its people satisfies a deep human need to sooth old injuries.

Near a London Underground station a metal gate in the midst of a brick wall is adorned with ivy, colorful ribbons, some with prayers written on them, flowers, feathers, bundles of dried grass, and other gifts. Inside the enclosure a small garden features a heart-shaped topiary and carefully tended flower beds.

This is Cross Bones, a graveyard where prostitutes were buried for hundreds of years beginning in medieval times. The women, known as “Winchester Geese” because they were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester to work in legalized brothels, could not be buried in hallowed ground.

The land was sold as a building site in the 1880s, but nothing was erected there until more than a hundred years later when the London Underground built a power sub-station on the land in 1990. It was when they began excavating that they unearthed a few of the old skeletons, which they estimated to total approximately 15,000.

Since then this place of anonymity and ignominy has been beautified and commemorated inside and out, informally and formally, through gardening and ceremony and simply through respectful attention.

John Constable, author of a series of poems and plays, The Southwark Mysteries, based on the imagined life of one of the women, writes:

“We've conducted many rituals and community events at the graveyard. The rituals are simple, inclusive and non-dogmatic, emphasising respect for ‘the Ancestors’, and honouring the spirit of this particular place. The Halloween of Cross Bones has been observed every Halloween night since 1998, with hundreds of people making the candlelit procession to the site, to honour 'the outcast dead' with candles, incense, songs and offerings.”

Members of the community pick up trash and replenish the impromptu shrine on the gate with fresh flowers. They are currently working to get permission to dedicate at least part of the burial ground as a memorial garden.

What is most remarkable about the attention and care given to Cross Bones is that it is ongoing. Because people in the community have cared for a wasteland and for forgotten women in simple, beautiful ways, the place has become what it never was in the past: hallowed ground.

THE ORPHANED PLACES

In 1987, when I was living in New York, writing scripts and producing soundtracks for multimedia productions, I read an article about an Oneida Indian engineer, David Powless, who had received a National Foundation grant to research and develop a process for recycling hazardous waste from steel mills. Along with a small group of co-colleagues I made a short video about David, funded by IBM and later shown to international IBM employees at a conference in Miami Beach. (The photo at the left was taken at that event.) The video explored David’s work, both as an engineer and as an Oneida man dedicated to fostering the traditional ways of his people. While we were working together, he told this story:

When he learned that he had received the grant, David said, he drove out to an enormous mound of steel waste and scrambled to the top. Triumphantly, he declared, “I’m going to conquer you!” Almost immediately, however, he knew that this approach was all wrong. “I realized that the waste was an orphan,” he said. “It had been lost from the cycle of life. My job was to bring it back to the cycle of life.”

I never forgot this story, which seemed to me to offer a new perspective on ecological crisis: a way loving parts of the earth that were, by most standards, unlovable, and even unlivable.

Ten years later, in 1997, I was guiding a vision quest in the Utah Canyonlands with Bill Plotkin when I had a vision of my own. That day the questers had come back to base camp after their three-day solo. In council they had told the stories of their journey, and in the morning we would hike out of the canyon and head back to Durango.

All that night, I remained suspended in a chaotic, uneasy state of half-sleep/half-wakefulness. As I lay in my sleeping bag under the stars I kept hearing someone walking around me, perhaps twenty or thirty feet away. Surprisingly, this constant movement in the dark did not worry me. I felt only a vague curiosity about it.

Toward dawn I became alert enough to ask, “Who’s there?” In that instant I had a vision of a young Anasazi man. He paused, approached, and said to me, in effect, that my task was to take people to the wounded places on the earth and give them beauty and compassion.

I was deeply touched by this vision, and for years afterwards tried to figure out how I might carry it out. I led a weeklong vigil in a clearcut forest in British Columbia; worked with a small group to make a mandala out of trash on a Pensacola, Florida beach; and presented a ceremony at New York’s Ground Zero shortly after September 11. However, I found that most people weren’t interested in going to troubled places; they preferred to visit pristine, beautiful nature. I often grieved that I could not enact the task that had been given to me. Then, over the past eight or nine years, I became very involved in writing and teaching about the path of the inner lover, the Beloved, and put the vision of troubled places temporarily aside.

Recently, however, it has become clear to me that the time is now right to bring forth a new way of looking at and being in the company of the troubled places on earth, what David Powless called “the orphans from the cycle of life.” With serious attention now being devoted to global climate change and other ecological challenges, and a new willingness on the part of so many people to examine their behavior on and toward the earth, it feels as if what I now Radical Joy for Hard Times is ready to unfold.