From My Nature Journal: Recruitment from the Seed Bank

Amateur naturalists frequently encounter provocative things as they observe creation, things they may never have seen before and perhaps never will again. Presenting themselves by direct experience, all one needs to do is pay good attention to their surroundings and ask inquisitive mental questions about what one is observing. But alternately, as we continue to seek understanding, we go deeper and learn through our reading. We come across details that have been studied by scientists in differing fields, and are often introduced to concepts that become equally intriguing. I recently ran into one such as I was reading about invasive plants: recruitment from the seed bank.

Anyone who pays attention to plants has encountered invasives -- whether kudzu in the Southeast, tamarisk in the Southwest, Scotch broom or English ivy in the Northwest, knotweed in the Northeast, milfoil in northern lakes or knapweed in the Midwest. My interest last week was purple loosestrife, a beautiful species brought to the USA as a cultivar in the 1800’s for
ornamental and medicinal use. In the last several decades it has proliferated such, especially in wet, marshy areas, that there are several states that have banned its sale. Like other invasives it chokes out native plants, and is especially damaging to species, both flora and fauna, already under other threats. We often see it in our travels across the northern states. 

But here’s the particular problem with loosestrife. It can grow to seven feet or more and can put out 2 to 3 million seeds per plant, regularly overwhelming nearby terrain in a hurry. And what’s worse is that the seeds are opportunists, and can lay dormant for years until just the right (or wrong!) ground disturbance brings them to the surface, presenting their perfect growing conditions; they then multiply so quickly that the land steward doesn’t know what hit them, and very soon it’s too late to manage. Recruitment from the seed bank, botanists call it. 

Now, that’s a rich concept, and it got me to thinking about just how much, and in just how many ways, that reality is active in our lives. And it can go either direction – to our or others’ benefit or to our or others’ detriment. Choosing to love makes for future recruitment from the seed bank. But so does choosing to hate. Small acts of kindness and mercy pay seeds forward. They come back to us. But so does the holding of resentment, or the withholding of forgiveness. Faith is a powerful investment in the seed bank. But a critical spirit is also; it’s just in the opposite direction to something positive. Even such things as people of faith memorizing Bible verses becomes a contribution to some kind of an endowment fund, what the Bible speaks of as ‘hiding God’s word in our hearts,’ so that its truth will come back to us in specific situations when we need it the most. I love the way Eugene Peterson paraphrased Psalm 119:11 – “I’ve banked your promises in the vault of my heart so I will not sin myself bankrupt.”

Choosing to love makes for future recruitment

from the seed bank. Small acts of kindness and

mercy do the same. They come back to us.

Each of the above practices – loving, hating, showing mercy, resenting, withholding forgiveness, acting in faith, criticizing, committing the Bible to memory – each of them stores up seeds for the future. Each of them, and so many more, bear fruit in times when the right (or wrong) conditions come calling. The question is, is it good fruit or bad? Is it a welcome wildflower or an invasive or noxious weed? Does it build up or destroy?

A beloved seminary professor of mine described even church work in this way as the constant planting of seeds. And I have surely found this to be so as a pastor. Things ‘sown’ one day may sprout quickly or can take an excruciatingly long time to produce an effect. These latter can lie buried. They’re dormant, but not dead, kept from action until a disturbance. My prof called pastoral work ‘soil work,’ preparation of the seed bank. We constantly lay the seed, then wait and watch for a disturbance – ‘a crisis, a visitation of the Holy Spirit to recruit the seed, surface it and let it sprout.’ 

But it’s not just true of pastoring work. It’s true of parenting work, of marriage work, in fact of all relational work. So, sow only good seed. Sow a LOT of it. Then trust God’s recruitment from your seed bank.

~~ RGM, July 27 2024

From My Nature Journal: Crows... And the Power of Hope

One of the things I greatly enjoy is volunteering at our local historic lighthouse, Admiralty Head Light on the Admiralty Inlet into Puget Sound. Whenever there and the going is slow (which isn’t very often, even on bad weather days, as the lighthouse tends also to be at times a warming house for cold or wet state park visitors!), I always pull a good book from the giftshop shelves and while away any spare time there may happen to be. There’s a lot there on natural history, so I’m never disappointed.

Am reading lately a delightful book titled Crow Planet by Lyanda Haupt, subtitled Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness. Originally published in 2011, it was revised just last year. As the two titles imply, there is much here specifically on crows, what Haupt considers the wild creature most available to urban nature observers, and deeply interesting to boot. Indeed, many of us have our unique crow stories! But the book also contains a great deal of fine philosophizing on the study of nature in general and the importance of earth stewardship (what many of us prefer to call creation care) for us urban and non-urban stewards alike.

I particularly appreciate her positive approach, and wanted to highlight with this blogpost an excerpt from one of her early chapters. 

We all know dour environmentalists (or perhaps we are one), wringing their hands while myopically bemoaning the disasters to befall the earth in the near future. Why, when we know that they are right, do we want to spill organic cranberry juice all over their hemp sandals? Because they are no fun, for one thing. And, more important, because they will suck us dry if we let them. But we don’t have to let them. There is a way to face the current ecological crisis with our eyes open, with stringent scientific knowledge, with honest sorrow over the state of life on earth, with spiritual insight, and with practical commitment. Finding such a way is more essential now than it has ever been in the history of the human species. But such work does not have to be dour (no matter how difficult) or accomplished only out of moral imperative (however real the obligation) or fear (though the reasons to fear are well founded). Our actions can rise instead from a sense of rootedness, connectedness, creativity, and delight…

Haupt then goes on to emphasize in the book that urban dwellers, who think they may have less access to nature than those who are blessed to live more immersed in it, and thus may feel less motivated to activism, actually often have more access to it than may first appear if they are simply diligent and creative in their observation. (Take crows, for example, who somehow have made their sassy yet cautious peace with humans in nearly all settings.) But I also deeply appreciate at least her head nod to the spiritual sensitivities and creativities that can motivate all people, especially people of faith, to be active in creation care. 

Secular naturalists often lay earth degradation and exploitation at the feet of the church, very unfairly IMHO (which is too frequently not so humble). But it has become clearer to many Christians (especially in the younger generations) that we can no longer stand on the sidelines of these efforts but rather take a leading role. Thus, it gives older people like me great joy to see organizations springing up like Young Evangelicals for Climate Action and Circlewood. 

But key to effective Christian involvement in this cause will be our spiritual sensitivities first to the classic faith practices of lament and repentance. Lament, of course, is Godly sorrow, a sorrow that matches God’s sorrow. But repentance, as you who have studied it know, is not only about Godly sorrow, but about a Godly turnaround, in short, a change of action, a new and better approach, a leaving behind of the old bad habit or behavior and a taking up of a new or renewed practice of a redeemed comportment in a moral and holy manner. 

However, something additional to these is also needed. Hope. Though Haupt does not use that word in the excerpt I shared above, her book is a tribute also to the hope that will be necessary as we work to redeem centuries of creation misuse. Hope will be indispensable to ongoing earth care. Despondency will not help. Indeed, the Bible assures us that hope has the power to keep us from despondency, “…Hope does not disappoint us… (Romans 5:3-5)” 

So check out the book. I think you’ll enjoy it, may even come up with some amazing crow stories to add to your own. 

But on the subject of creation care? Work hard. And never stop hoping. 

~~ RGM, March 31, 2022

QOTM...*: Wendell Berry's Spring

(*Quote of the Month)

To sit and look at light-filled leaves

May let us see, or seem to see,

Far backward as through clearer eyes

To what unsighted hope believes:

The blessed conviviality

That sang Creation’s seventh sunrise,

Time when the Maker’s radiant sight

Made radiant every thing He saw,

And every thing He saw was filled

With perfect joy and life and light.

His perfect pleasure was sole law;

No pleasure had become self-willed.

For all His creatures were His pleasures

And their whole pleasure was to be

What He made them: they sought no gain

Or growth beyond their proper measures,

Nor longed for change or novelty.

The only new thing could be pain.

                        ~~ Wendell Berry

I have shared quotes and poetry before by Wendell Berry, one of my favorite writers. (Click here for one of those posts.) But I recently reread his A Timbered Choir, a collection of pieces he calls his Sabbath poems, written during and after Sunday walks on his Kentucky farm. I was particularly touched by this piece, titled simply 1979, III.

It’s an Eastertide poem to me, something of which my spirit remains full. Speaking of the time before sin entered our existence, before we even had need of a Redeemer, it tells the ‘blessed conviviality of Creation’s seventh sunrise,’ when ‘our whole pleasure was to be what he made’ us to be. But other pleasures came to prevail within

and about us, many of which could only produce pain. Inferred here in spite of them is the hope of redemption, the longing for a restoration, or a re-creation, that could also only come from Creation’s Creator.

But for me it’s also a poem of springtime. The young season here has been nothing but a wild one so far. It started out with a bang -- a foot and a half of snow on spring’s third day -- in a storm that was supposed to have brought only three to five inches. (It’ll give us some great spring wildflowers in our arid meadows.) But since then we’ve had wildly vacillating temps between the teens and even the 70’s, tempestuous winds in excess of fifty miles an hour, a little bit

of rain, sleet and flurries, and much sunshine. The snow is long gone, but it still seems there’s a battle waging between old man winter and Mother Nature’s summer. We know, of course, which will prevail. At least for now…

Through the days here at 6000 feet, the leaf buds have swollen and we’ve begun to see the first hint of green on the river willows and cottonwoods, always the first deciduous trees to show here in Colorado. But I find my anticipation swelling along with the buds, and it brings me back to the joy of the poem. In my mind’s eye I already see that spring sun shining through those leaves, and I celebrate the hope-filled images of joy, life, light and a re-created earth that Easter makes 

                                         possible. Read the poem again if you have time, and enjoy these 

                                         images with me.

~~Blessed Eastertide,

RGM, April 6 2016

From My Nature Journal: When I Get to Heaven

When I get to heaven, tell me there will still be woods,

          Where a sauntered pace

          May be had without needing to keep

          One’s bearings of time or space,

          Forests with birds and creatures

          And bits of splendor that take breath away:

          Spring Beauties and Forget-Me-Nots,

          Summer’s ferns and fungus,

          Autumn leaves that crackle afoot

          Belying midwinter’s absurd stillness;

          And, yes, one with whom to walk who enjoys it as I, or as You.

I do love the woods.

When I get to heaven, tell me there will still be canoes,

          That skim cold, pristine lakes,

          Leaving wakes

          That last not long,

          By quiet stroke and firm hand

          Easing gently over mirror calm,

          Or bobbing swell and wave

          Into bright, hidden bays

          Where eagles nest and loons dive,

          Or sliding into dark, night water

          Silver by moonshine all the way to rocky shore.

I do love canoes.

When I get to heaven, tell me there will still be seasons,

          When color palates fly -- 

          January’s blazing whites,

          Lupine’s spring, a rainbow’s July,

          Aspen’s or maple’s fall,

          Living greens, waning yellows, dying reds,

          Late summer suns whose early setting

          Have always made me sad

          These things have to end,

          Like winter hearth-fires that blaze like those suns

          But then look so cold when the morning comes.

I do love seasons.

And if there be foolishness in me

For laying such earthly hope upon heaven’s landscape,

Have mercy on me, Lord:

I love this world you made.

It’s what I know.

(Endnote: I saw the rough idea for this poem many years ago, anonymously cited, so it’s not completely original to me. But at that time, I added significantly to it and adapted it so extensively that I cannot now recall what was original and what is mine. To this day, though, I am still unable to come up with a source, so if any part of it sounds familiar to you and you can set me straight, I’d appreciate you letting me know so I may give credit appropriately. Thanks.)

~~ RGM, October 31 2015

QOTM...*: Robert Franklin Leslie

(*Quote of the Month)

It seems to me that only leaves possess

the secret of a beautiful death.

                                                           

                           ~~Robert Franklin Leslie

Photos taken Sept 28-Oct. 1

Sometimes the simplest little quotes jump right off a page and into my heart. Such is the case with this one. I was cruising along in nature writer Robert Franklin Leslie’s simple little The Bears and I, and was halted by this lovely (and mostly true) reflection. Perhaps it strikes me all the more because I happen to be surrounded as I write by nature’s fall color frenzy going on around me here in the northwoods of Michigan. Maple’s oranges and reds blaze around me, along with oak’s scarlets and russets, and aspen’s, tamarack’s and birch’s golds, all interspersed with the various evergreens of the conifers. I walk the woods these days spellbound by its almost aching beauty, almost asking God with each step what possessed him to even think of creating this astounding display.

So the quote grabs me, “…only leaves possess the secret of a beautiful death.” Yet I must admit it has not been completely true in my experience. As a pastor for many years, I have been able to observe many deaths up close and personal, and some of them have been beautiful as well.

I think of a couple old saints who died during my pastoral tenure in Minnesota. One was Joe, who lived into his upper nineties, a gentle and thoughtful soul who always had candy in his pockets for kids on Sunday mornings. I once asked him what he attributed his longevity to, and he quipped just as fast as a blink, “Well, I like people, and I never eat cold potato salad.” Alrighty then, thought I… I’ll have to remember that one! His death was beautiful, as was the life celebration that followed by those who loved him.

Another beautiful death was Hilda’s. Single and childless all her life, she lived as a constant blessing to others around her, often giving the proverbial shirt off her back. She was fairly poor and lived in a mobile home on the east side, but when I heard the story that, before she gave her church offerings, she regularly laundered and crisply starched and pressed her greenbacks, just to give of her best to her Master, I became a lifelong member of her fanclub. She is one of the first I want to see when I get to heaven. Like Joe, her death was also beautiful – she was ready to go and, a smile on her face, ready to let go.

My own mother’s was another. Wilma also had this way of living a full life in the midst of great simplicity. All of us in the family had this sense of the blessing and goodness not only of her life, but even of the last hard years, and even the manner of her passing. When some of us met with her pastor the day following her death, the pastor’s first words to me were, “I am so sorry.” And I was surprised to find myself saying that it occurred to me that, except for the fact that we would miss Mom greatly, most of us were finding very little in this circumstance to be sorry about: Mom was at peace with God, at peace with the world, and beloved of absolutely everyone who knew her. We all should be so blessed when it is time for each of us to lay it all down.

The arresting beauty of an autumn forest, and the joy it can bring, seems kin to the joy that is expressed in lives and deaths like that of Joe, Hilda and Wilma. Yes, of course, there have been many deaths I have walked alongside that have not been so beautiful, and I suppose that brings me back to my quote of the month. Some deaths can be beautiful, some not. But here in the woods today? Today, everywhere I look I see only loveliness. Talk about ‘finishing well,’ or going out ‘in a blaze of 

                                                     glory!’ Maybe, overall, leaves DO possess the secret after all.

And maybe, just maybe, God whispers through them to us the very same secret, that there can be beauty, even hope, in such a thing as death.

~~RGM, September 29, 2014