Time for Contemplation

Cloudless sulfur recently emerged
 I do my best thinking in my garden, with an adult beverage or not. I once was married to a woman who didn't understand this - at least she didn't appreciate it. With my hand on the door knob, she'd ask me if I was going to "go out and stare at my garden" once again. Of course I was.
Nearly everything I have learned in life has come from immersing myself in nature. I owe a great debt to those teachers who have shared their knowledge with me, but it has been time alone that has meant the most. Life is often so hectic that we can't really take in all that is occurring around us. Time to contemplate is precious and there is no better place to do that than in nature. In my case, that often means in my garden.
I pity those who don't spend time in their landscapes. For many, there is really no reason to do so, but for those of us that have reduced our sod and replaced it with a living landscape of native plants, there is always something to see and to revel in. I try to find time each morning and early evening in my landscape, watching for the life that I have planned for - life that I am now intrinsically connected to. In my landscape, all of us are equals. We are as Joseph Wood Krutch wrote, connected by that great chain of life.
I am reading a truly amazing book right now by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, that has touched a special place in my heart. As she discusses our place in nature, she makes clear what has always seemed to haunt the back of my mind in a more nebulous way. As she points out so eloquently, the English language has deprived us of our ability to connect with nature in the same way as most indigenous people do. It has made us the center of the universe by giving us "he" and "she" while relegating everything else in nature to "it".  How can we ever understand our real connection to the natural world when we've created such an anthropocentric universe?
As I watch the life that is now around me and have the time to contemplate it, I understand that I am really no more important to this great web of life than the chickadees that flit now to my feeder or the sulfur butterfly that passes overhead to start a new generation on my privet cassia. We are all elements of the same living tapestry. We are partners in this experiment that was somehow triggered more than a billion years ago. We were not created to provide dominion to this experiment, but perhaps to shepherd it a bit. When we place ourselves outside the web, we do it an injustice and we demean its incredible and mysterious beauty.  If we place ourselves inside, we can better contemplate and appreciate the gifts we've been given by having a place there.
Today, I am "social distancing" myself in lieu of what is considered "normal" activity, but truth be told I seek the social distancing model far more often than the other. After all, I have a developing living landscape and I am surrounded by a vast array of contemporaries that are unconcerned. It is a time for our species to readjust our perspective. After all, we have caused the rest of the universe to adjust to us. Now we adjust to us too.

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