[SB] Sabbath Blessings

[Molly Wolf]

Dandelions Redux

Wherever I go these days I seem to see a flush of pure gold creeping over 
the landscape, a phenomenon that makes me rejoice greatly. The dandelions 
are out.

In force, I should add. There are a *lot* of them this year. I was trying 
to figure out what the difference is this time around, and I finally put my 
finger on it: dandelions have taken over all the institutional lawns.  This 
town has a lot of institutions -- the university, the big psychiatric 
hospital complex with its ample grounds, the college, the prison properties 
-- and it seems that not one of them has taken any anti-dandelion 
initiatives this spring.  Hence the gold-bedecked lawns.

This makes me happy, for three reasons. First, I view the Green Velvet Lawn 
convention as being a tremendous waste of effort, energy, and resources, 
and I wish it would simply go away. Second, I love dandelions for their own 
sake -- for their gorgeous golden flowers, for their shagginess, their 
insouciance, their hardiness, their ability to colonize soils too difficult 
for lesser plants.  And third, I like what this is saying about where my 
local society is heading. At some level, people have made the decision to 
live with dandelions rather than use herbicides to control them.

I don't know who made the decision, except I don't think it's the city; it 
might be local managers of these properties or it might be federal and 
provincial policy. But once I started to notice, I realized that dandelions 
seem to be on the increase in most areas these days. It could have 
something to do with the heat and drought of last summer, which might 
weaken grasses and make them less competitive. But what's also clear is 
that cosmetic pesticide use is 'way, 'way down.

This cheers me because I'm always on the lookout for things that point in 
the Kingdom way, and a turning away from pesticides certainly qualifies. 
The stuff is toxic as hell, and there's no reason other than pure vanity to 
use it on lawns.  We've erected the Green Velvet Lawn as a North American 
godlet and we're willing to sacrifice heavily at that particular altar, not 
just by using pesticides, but by pouring precious fresh waters on lawns in 
desert areas and by generating greenhouse gases through the use of gas 
mowers. The institutions in town, it seems, are willing to reconsider this 
particular bit of pop theology and to take the godlet's altar down.

It's been hard for us humans to consider the possibility that maybe the 
Creator would prefer us to love Creation just as it is, as opposed to the 
way we think it should be. It's been especially hard for North Americans, 
because the landscape we moved into was so huge and generous, apparently 
unlimited in its bounty, and because our colonial societies had particular 
quite rigid conventions that we failed to question.  We plundered (and go 
on plundering) our piece of this Earth unthinkingly, without any regard to 
what it could sustain in the long run.

But we've had our consciences stirred, always a good thing, by those who do 
love Creation, and maybe it's starting to show in the gold-spattered lawns 
around this town. It's one of those things like confronting (say) spousal 
abuse, or the sexual exploitation of children, or racism: we took the 
existing state of affairs completely for granted until someone woke us up 
to an evil we could not justify, and then, hard as it was to change, we 
really didn't have an option. I'm not generally one for saying there is 
only one right way of being, but there *is* a right general direction, and 
once we've seen what it is, we can't avoid it any longer. We can't return 
to unconsciousness. We can either move in that direction or take action to 
deny or evade that consciousness, but we've lost our ignorant innocence.

It will take a while. My neighbour, who is in her 80s, has her lawn "done" 
several times during the summer. I don't know her well enough to ask her if 
she realizes what her pesticide use might be doing to my cats, or her own 
grandchildren for that matter. She hasn't connected the dots. I doubt if 
she wants to.

But other have, going by the dandelion explosion. For which God be thanked.

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All you can do is preach the Gospel. Then duck.  -- +Thomas Ely