OUR SECRET GARDEN AND THE WORLD

A significant part of this past summer was spent in our garden, privately, until now, referred to by us as our Secret Garden.

We have dug and mowed and built and watered and planted and trimmed, etc.
We encountered challenges and achieved successes as we went about our chores.
We fed birds and watched the squirrels and chipmunks and groundhogs and possums and so on go about their daily duties.

And we felt good.

The creatures appeared busy and happy and successful.
And such was often the case.

And then came this morning.

It snowed lightly last night and a thin coating of snow was melting off the glass table on the deck.
The third cup of coffee was consumed and the two delivered papers had been read.
Life was good.

And then there came the thump at the front window.
A robin had struck the window and fallen onto the bench on the front porch…and as I went to look I had the brief impression of a great brown wing flashing out of sight to the right of my line of sight.

I saw the robin breathing heavily and on its side on the bench, eyes open.
Thank goodness, still alive.
And then, the brown wing reappeared on the bench, next to the robin…an important appendage of a very much alive and predatory hawk…really quite beautiful and efficient, about to do its duty.

I opened the front door – the wing flew away…the robin had time to recover….
Hawk did not return and shortly the little creature flew away, apparently recovered.

This event was, of course, a reminder that the animals in our Secret Garden are not really playing, despite the spin we observers put upon their comings and goings.

They are busy, seriously busy, engaged in a constant life and death routine.
They are not really playing.

There is a lesson here.

Our Garden has a definite worldly aspect to it.

Except that folks in the world actually do play a lot. At least some of us do.

But they also have to work and plan and face dangers, some of which can and do turn out to be catastrophic.
Surely there is no need to give examples.

If I hadn’t driven off the hawk, the robin would have been toast.

If the world does not deal successfully with the dangers it faces, it too will be toast.
No threat. Just fact.
Always.

And now to the point.

The natural world only appears to be bambi-like.

It is really, like the TV character Monk says, a jungle out there.

Safe play-like existences, really safe ones, require a lot of work.
Soft power, one of the mantras of the libs, fades away in the face of the most dangerous threats.

The failure of the good guys over the millennia to solve the problem of the threats from the bad guys is not only because of ignorance but because we live in a world where perfection, long-term, does not exist.

Perfection, such as it is, requires constant work, cultivation, if you will, or it will go to seed [fall into chaos].

There really are weeds in the garden.
There really are unacceptable dangers in the world.

Treating the weeds, the dangers as equally entitled to life as the precious flowers will only result in a ruined garden, a ruined world.

Such is one of the lessons of our Private Garden.