Restoration Journal

"The usual objects have their moral significance. An oak-tree is to us a moral object because it lives its life regularly and fulfills its destiny." – Bailey, from The Holy Earth










The question does come up in this work we do in restoration – can you believe in the prairie? As we move along the edges of the question belief, morals, ethics, we sense that grasping towards but perhaps never quite getting our fists around something stable and true defines the age. We have a lot of options to choose from our past; we have a multitude to look toward in the future, whether by light or darkness. As for today, it has become just a bit more difficult, let's face it, to go ahead and accept that which we can get our hands around right now, this moment. News, politics, videos, games and apps are all there, but they're not there. Vapid is the word that comes to mind and, when we open up the brief pages of moral history of the beginning of the 21st century, unfortunately that will the defining nature of the times – a sort of cascade of vapidity, with a deep and secret longing for something to land on, but an unwillingness to let go of the hope of the next tech-giggle. In the meantime, pick up a pair of loppers, take your direction from restoration specialist, and begin the work of helping the prairie temporarily anyway, get rid of invasives and reorganize itself around what could or should be there. Spiritual endeavors, sooner or later, will need a book, a tool, a piece of paper, a plant, a vegetable or a water can, that it is to say some technique. Farmers are the last of us to know this without even sensing that they have to bring it up. There is a complete difference between visiting the track along Curtis Prairie in order to listen to the whippoorwills, and walking into a dense cluster of dogwoods, dressed down to the toes and up to the neck, bug sprayed, hatted, gloved and armed (sorry for metaphor) with loppers or shovel and becoming intimate with the species. The farmer took his and her craft for granted because it was nothing less than instinct made to survival by the addition of producing tools. That makes sense. It was obvious and had to be done. Today, the great link, – the one that separates the current tendency toward grasping and landing – is the task and the tool. A walk through the woods with children is green and it is mosquito. It is an introduction to a book; but we all know the difference between reading the introduction and reading the book. Education stops at the level of the introduction. Why? It feels something like one of two things: embarrassment on the part of the educator (that the poor student should have to endure something so boring as nature, as they plainly make seen) or a lack of knowledge in their own right. The farmer who is teacher has the childrens' hands in the earth before the first squeak of discontent chimes in walking line. They used to call this work. The modern teacher knows little about this and therefore doesn't understand that it is work itself that is one-half of the holiness. But there again, does the teacher know what appropriate holiness is? Is it possible that this too is boring? Are educators embarrassed that the earth is holy or do they just not understand? We see in the go around with what to believe in, we have no models of authority left. As we have lost the farmer so too we have lost of the various components that go into believing in the prairie. To believe in the prairie is to give it some of our time, some of our purpose. Devotion, of course, is a strange and tangled word for us in an age of skipping across the tops of things. Devotion is, however, the essential starting point of belief. I wonder if a teacher might come to know this?