MOUNTAIN VIEW: Sweet Flower of Prayer

By LIZA FIELD/Columnist

To see a world in a grain of sand
and Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
and Eternity in an hour.

- William Blake

We live in paradise. I noticed it on May Day, songbirds and creekbirds flitting through my little woods, butterflies floating over the flowers, fat bumblebees bumping clumsily into each other through the blooming bushes.
The air smelled like your grandmother’s pink soap-for-company, with the waxy globs of white and lavender lilac, purplish dame’s-rocket, hyacinths and other pastel perfumeries. Cherry blossoms still sprinkled the jade-green violet leaves like snowflakes, and newly-dark, blotchy shadows blinked and bobbed with the breeze, enlivening winter’s old landscape with an entirely new dimension.
It’s the kind of scene that dissolves all the muscle in my legs, compelling me to plunk down on a street curb, a back stair, a log or somebody’s stone wall, and gaze around.
Up on Pine Ridge, where I sometimes walk through the woods from a grass path below, the scene was intoxicating. Through the white dogwood blooms and the woodland sprinkles of new green, the distant blue mountains glowed like a mystical slide show projected onto that thin veil between here and heaven.
“Please help,” I thought, staring down through the woods. “Please don’t let us end all of this beauty.”
It’s my usual prayer—not very articulate or sanctified or official, and not even looking up but down. I know things are in trouble here—the oceans, the atmosphere, wetlands and woods. It seems that something oblivious in us desires to keep burning up the earth—her ancient fossil reserves, rain-forests and now the fields we’re creating or converting for ethanol production—millions of acres of combustible bio-fuels to get us all where we aren’t.
A biologist from Wythe County created his own bumpersticker, which I saw recently at a tree-planting event. “Ethanol: how many meals per gallon?”
Not just meals, but woods and wildlife. If so much arable land and habitat must be converted into humanity’s fuel tank, it will come at great cost—not just to people. It’s like temporarily removing a gas tax for summertime “relief”—it may look like a bargain, but it won’t encourage conservation, nor solve the actual problem of our insatiability.
What to do? Even though some analysts disparage looking backwards, it’s worth a check in the rear view to remember that we didn’t always have to drive so far and transport so much, in order to feel content on this earth.
People grew gardens, pasture and orchards, not just acres of gas-guzzling lawn. Roger King of Crockett told me that every fall, locals would come to his orchard to load up on bushels of apples to keep in cold cellars and to can. Likewise, people put up local vegetables and pork for winter; local dairies supplied milk. Local creameries existed. Greens could be eaten early in spring and late in the fall. Onions and cabbages lasted all winter, buried upside down in newspaper. Rabbits and fish were plentiful. Things did not have to be trucked-in from California—much less shipped from China.
The Land Care movement in Grayson County is trying to revive this kind of self-sufficiency, with a timber co-op, a certified local grass-fed beef slaughter house and other initiatives for community-based sustainability. The idea is to re-empower residents of that particular place, rather than continuing to sell the farmland to outside developers, clearcut the forests and depend on the Midwest for one’s daily bread.
But anyone in our region can join the effort toward sustainability by beginning to notice where we live, instead of gazing right past it.
As William Blake implied, one can find infinity in one hike down Rock Castle Gorge to see the mayapple, trillium, bloodroot and ladyslippers and roaring creek.
Eternity could be got in one overnight at Mt. Rogers, hiking the rocky meadows, camping and gazing up at the stars.
Heaven could emerge in a few blessed moments of stillness each evening in the backyard, learning from the joyful, content birds of the air and flowers of the field that Jesus himself esteemed.
May Day was also the National Day of Prayer, I realized that evening, hearing various political figures in radio news clips tell crowds that only God could save America, that man’s efforts would amount to naught.
I wondered. Hadn’t the God of Genesis put man in the garden to tend it? Surely tending a garden took human “effort.” Surely having “dominion” did not mean “destroy the place”—even passively.
After all, we human beings have not meant to destroy the earth. It seems we just have been unable to see it, in our urge for something else. John Milton, in “Paradise Lost,” portrays the serpent as a goad to Eve’s discontent. “Just over the wall of Paradise,” he essentially convinces her, “Lie marvels much more exciting than THIS old place.”
And so we continue spending billions in our search for water on Mars, surveying the real estate on the moon and planning to inhabit space—when we have never learned to value the one planet we do know provides water, nor our “real estate” as gardeners of a live earth we are looking right past. And so we continue burning up the place on our way somewhere-else.
T.S. Eliot concludes “The Four Quartets” with a prophecy we could use this May, as speculators buy up grains and vacationers begin “burning up the roads” and the world grows hungrier.
“The end of all our exploring,” Eliot writes in a flash of hope, “will be to arrive where we started—and know the place for the first time.”
May it be so.