I've been posting some "wisdom" on my facebook page lately, and I know not everyone who reads the blog follows TDM on facebook. So here you are -- nuggets of thought from your prairie sage (if only I smelled half as good):
I believe that gardens are wildlife preserves.
Gardens are moral acts of civil disobedience, the same as if we chained
ourselves to tractors digging pipelines or tearing down forests or
unzipping last vestiges of prairie. Gardens (native perennial and veg)
say no to big ag, big oil, and misguided government owned by special
interests. Gardens say no to continuing our violent history with this
planet and each other. Gardens are freedom and democracy in the truest
spirit. Gardens save lives -- human, bee, bird, wasp, fly, spider, frog.
Out here in Nebraska you can be tarred and
feathered for decrying big agriculture. But agreeing that big
agriculture destroys just about everything in the environment means
we're then complicit -- that the glory days we're in now will not belong
to our progeny as we use up everything good; this is a lot to
swallow. I don't believe in slowly winning over people, I'm just too
impatient and misanthropic. Only through
the deliberate work of writing can I order my ranting and raving into
something that, perhaps, will slip under the radar and move us back into
the world as caretakers and not pillagers. Only through growing prairie
plants alongside my writing can I become the language I most want,
where words become action then fall away to the glory of butterflies,
bees, birds, and some bittersweet taste of hope.
For 5.5 years the subtitle of my blog has been
"Poetry, Nonfiction, Gardening, Environment -- All in the Prairie."
Today, I changed it to "Living and Writing in the Prairie Echo." It's
not a big deal, but I think I finally discovered a term that suits the
disconnect between corn fields and prairie preservation / the myth that
prairie still exists here. Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas,
Oklahoma, Texas, Dakotas -- we all live in the prairie echo, and it's
getting harder and harder to make out what the echo is saying.
4 comments:
That is a good title.
Interesting too that you see gardening as subversive. In England, I think, it's much more closely entwined with our sense of the tradition of ordinary people - say through cottage gardens and allotments - and with the exclusiveness of the righ -through the big estate gardens. Neither are subversive - but nor are they endorsing big agriculture either.
Love the new subtitle and I agree that those of us who garden with natives do so as we thumb our noses at big ag and others...I like being a life saver.
Lucy--Yes, our horticultural tradition is the yeoman farmer, which is a bona fide myth. I wish gardening and SOME sort of love or connection to nature was more a part of our culture, as we'd be healthier for it.
Donna -- Thumbing my nose with you. Now I want orange lifesavers.
oh, I'd like 'Living and Writing in the Prairie Echo' as a new name for your blog! I hear your impassioned voice more clearly than with The Deep Middle, which feels Middle Earth fiction and geography. Benjamin Vogt = prairie, even if that isn't currently his blog's name.
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