Throughout the whole of Saturday a light mist steadfastly fell upon the landscape. Looking over the tops of yellow-green native currant bushes and up towards the she-oak drizzle shrouded hill, I rejoiced on the goodness of this timely soak.
Earlier in the week the long range weather forecast had predicted a Saturday rain, so, on Monday and Tuesday my workmate Steve and I (mostly Steve) erected a new form of wallaby defense to deter the hungry creatures from constantly ravaging the young trees (see squashed blue bags from previous, protective attempts).
On Thursday, I drove to the native plant nursery and purchased 400 seedling trees, and Friday, starting at 7AM and working alone on a wonderfully sunny and meditative day, I managed to put in 320 of them before my body called quits around 5PM and I headed off to a “two-box” epsom salt soak in the outdoor tub.
Hard work. Gosh, yes. But there’s something immensely satisfying about this sort of physical labor that no matter how exhausting, it uplifts one’s spirit to such a degree that the soreness doesn’t really matter.
The [Mayan] Tzutujil never assumed that the sun would shine again the following day or that they wouldn’t disappear and another life form take their place. They did, however, know that if they were to continue on the Earth, the losses that they as humans caused to Nature and their own natures were voids that dangerously undermined the very matrix of the universe of which they were part and which gave them life.
The villagers knew that what defined a person as a complete human was our ability to fill those hollow places with sacrifices equivalent to the chunks we pried from the surrounding nature to feed our children.
The sacrifice that made humans useful to the world were the sacrifices of offerings made with what only humans had, namely the product of their magnificent opposable thumbs and the songlike eloquence of their human speech, upon which the Gods who also magically made tangible life with their speech were fed and made drunk and ecstatic. The ecstasy of Nature and the Gods was the fertile tree-filled exuberance of the land.
from Stealing Benefacio’s Roses, by Martin Prechtel
Down, up. Down, up. Three hundred and twenty times, down then up. For every tree planted I knelt down as though on a grass prayer rug, and, close enough to kiss the earth, gently nudged the root ball into its hole and new home using my “opposable thumbs”.
Not once, as I put them one-by-one into the ground, did it seem cheesy or spiritual-lite to say a little prayer for each tree’s health and well being and beauty and happiness.
Over the 18 years that I have been re-foresting what was once a barren paddock, there have been over 7,500 native trees and shrubs planted out, or approximately one for each day that I have lived at Windgrove. This I call my Windgrove Earth Tithing. This is my repayment to mother earth for whatever I have used or cajoled from her to sustain my life. This is a small portion of a larger debt owed for the mis-use and degradation of her soil.
On this rainy day, this is my way of saying thanks for her beneficence.
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Just outside my kitchen window grows a “saw tooth” Banksia and it is producing—quickly, easily and with no fuss—several winning examples of the above test question. It seems to me that even plants can beat humans in the mathematics game. Proof that the notion of a human—nature divide is as fallacious as the human—animal divide.
Just ask this little bird perched on the far right of the edge of its own swimming pool. It looks straight at me and chirps a big thank you for protecting its little life with plenty of fresh water.
