When you can't talk about a thing, talk about plants.
A plant does not decide where it grows. A seed lands and either sprouts or doesn’t.
A plant has no borders nor allegiances, no judgment nor hatred.
A plant merely exists, and that is enough. It either survives and thrives or withers and dies depending on its environment and genetic makeup. All other organisms must adapt, avoid, or move to get more or less of that plant as needed for their survival. A plant is only experienced as toxic or non-toxic, depending on what it interacts with.
Without human existence or intervention, a plant is not categorized and labelled as being a weed (AKA bad for the land) or something we want to grow on that land (good). In the absence of humans, a plant is not judged as not being enough or for being too much. It simply appears and disappears based on its inherent intelligence. And that is enough.
Survival is what all beings are programmed to do. Organisms that adapt well for survival in the environment go on to propagate and might eventually spread and take up more land. This is not without consequence. As anyone who gardens knows, something may have to go to make room. Sometimes, as a gardener, a creature or organism I’ve defined as a pest becomes a threat to what I hope to cultivate on my land. And that, perhaps, is where things start to get messy.
We humans are infinitely wise, blessed with conscious thought and the ability to express our experience of being through the arts in ways other beings don’t seem able to. And yet, our belief that we are better decision-makers than all else in nature tends to make a mess. We choose to see ourselves as different and better than plants and animals, two organisms we depend on for survival. From there, we start to see ourselves as better or worse than each other due to highly subjective factors like identity labels. Our judgment, which is evolutionarily rooted in our survival skills, is error-prone. Our desire to assign meaning to things can be beautiful and powerful, but it is so influenced by unreliable, unstable factors like perspective, perception, and memory that it can’t truly be trusted. Our narratives, on repeat, create our reality, and yet we often choose stories that hurt and harm us.
Yesterday, I took a meandering, brisk walk at the Toronto Botanical Gardens/Edwards Gardens with my plant-loving octagenarian mom, and my dad’s first cousin and her husband, who came to visit from the Bay Area in honour of my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. The leaves are changing colour, doing their annual job of teaching us that letting go can be beautiful and that death is a process, a necessary milestone on the circular road of life. So often, when folks come to visit, we want to take them to see concrete structures, but on this visit, we’ve taken a softer approach, choosing October’s natural beauty as the thing worth seeing.
Most of us there were gardeners, so to spend an afternoon marvelling at the colourful clusters of beauty still delighting from the cold ground while the world implodes was healing. There were so many flowers that defied what we believed might be able to survive in the Canadian cold, and we snapped pictures on our phones to identify them. (If you haven’t played with this feature on your iPhone yet, I highly recommend it.) My cousin’s husband, a kind, gentle soul who teaches ceramics and works as a gardener part-time, pointed out banana trees and castor bean plants that are not at all native to Canada but, through human intervention and attention, stood tall among the sumac, hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, aster, and spindle. Plants that weren’t native to these lands shared soil with plants that were, and the results were harmonious and gorgeous. Humans did that!
He explained that castor bean plants (native to East Africa and which look like marijuana plants on steroids) grow to a massive showy size, flower, and then die. The “beans,” AKA seeds, are also highly poisonous, as they contain ricin. And yet, when these beans are pressed, we get castor oil, something I hated as a child but was often given to help with chronic constipation.
I learned a lot from reading this wonderful post on Ontario’s castor bean plants. The plant is super delicious to ants, who cart the beans into their dens, eat what they love and discard the seeds atop their nests, which is part of the co-creation process. There’s no germination without the ants! A handful of the beans can make humans very sick and was used by colonizers in India to get their servants to fall in line. That something so majestic can either be healing or deadly in the hands of humans struck me as profound.
Of course — unchecked — some plants and organisms can create havoc, but I wonder how nature would account for that in our absence. Mother Earth has always figured it out, even if she had to spend millennia frozen over and sleeping until she was ready to start again. She doesn’t need us to exist. We get to be here in her good graces, and she continues to shower us with abundance, despite how frequently we fuck up.
Every living thing on this planet has a purpose. Often, we simply haven’t discovered its full benefits to humanity or other organisms. Every single thing in life that we deem “good” also has a little nugget of shit in it. And everything we classify as terrible, bad, or evil has a little diamond in it. Yin/Yang. Nothing is 100% what it seems, and humans are terrible judges of this, unfortunately.
We wage war on dandelions, for example, whose greens fight cancer when consumed regularly. We often battle them with glysophate-laden weed killers that are known to cause cancer in humans and also kill bees, which, over time, will completely hinder the germination of our food sources.
We plant endless lawns that require countless gallons of precious water to remain green. We cut them short with electric or gas-powered machines because some Christian European Imperialist nation crossed an ocean, claimed land they felt entitled to, and remade that land in a version of its image. We don’t ask, “What would the original stewards of this land do?” We don’t question why a lawn is not only planted where there was no manicured lawn before but also why it is mowed consistently and protected at all costs. We just accept these acts as things we must do so everything looks as it “should.”
What I’m saying is that we are not reliable judges of what is good or bad for us, not just as a people living on the land but as a global community of humans who care for one another. If we had better critical thinking skills, we might have a chance at creating environments where we can all thrive in peace. Where we seek to find the value and wonder inherent to all things, even in those we believe are unpleasant and unworthy. Where we ask hard questions and truly listen to each other and deeply within ourselves for answers. Where we tend to our Fight, Flight and Freeze responses when questions and conversations activate us so that we can turn toward each other even when we disagree. Until we see the heart and the humanity in the other.
We must imagine our way out of this, fellow big-hearted dreamers. If we can imagine prisons, war, power structures, famine, and violent mass deaths, we also have the capacity to imagine and create beautiful, symbiotic gardens and communities that nourish and sustain life. We must turn stories and narratives over and over, revealing the shit in the shiny things and the diamonds in the shit — until our soil is once again fertile enough to sustain our humanity, full of love and free of fear.
As I said in my last post, which, at the time of posting, I had no clue would be relevant to the days to come: “I belong nowhere, and, as such, I must belong everywhere in this world and the lands I was dropped into. And so do you, wherever you are, whoever you are. You matter, and you deserve to live in peace and love.”
I love you. I love and believe in us. I strongly believe that the ugliness, pain and heartache we are currently experiencing as people who feel and care deeply will transform us in beautiful and unknown ways. What gets your attention becomes your reality, so keep looking for the diamonds in the shit. They may be obscured right now, but I know they are there, waiting to be revealed. Have faith and hold each other tight.