Lawnmower World

Attending to vitality
requires morale.
and also gives it.
Each day is impossible. Each day is in service to possibility.
I am a meadow, living in a world of lawnmowers……
Knowing the clanking culture of destruction like my own hand… in my own hands,
with my own hands.
The same hands that heal and hold babies.
Knowing also that life outlives un-life.
Tiny, fragile, determined little green things all wiggling around
being pulled into life, pushing into life
Together:
They are in the darkness, lost, and on their way,
Each new organism is ancient,
Arriving in a continuum.
A million years, a hundred trillion family members,
A single moment of all living things, is infinite generations of backward and forward.
Happening. Right under my feet, right into my breakfast, right there, right here!
Meadowing,
Tending the delicate interplay, the deep time, the moment, the possibility of ongoing worlds of:
Bacteria, insects, plants, fungi, rodents, birds, reptiles and mammals – me.
Learning…
Doing, in fractal musicality… a composing of forms.
Such doing is allowing for the doing that moves among,
Among-ing us in creatura.
The lawnmowers will come, with relentless appetites.
The whirling blades of productivity and efficiency.
and the meadow stands no chance.
They are fast and cold, sharp and brutal.
They do not have the silence of either predator or prey.
Smashing metallic things do not worry, or cry, or scar or fall in love.
They are unfeeling, unknowing, un-sensing, un-alive.
Then, yes, those other guys,
the dandelions, the horsetail,
The punkrockers.
Unstopped by the carousel of twisting knives.
I am learning grace from them.
Garages fill with poisons that promise to knock them out.
Ha.
It is a fool’s task to un-life the world that gives us life.
Horrible hubris.
With an infection in our connection.
Meadows still tickle themselves with fluttering, scurrying, slithering organisms.
Slime and rot and stink,
Mess and mistakes, and muddles…these are the messages of morale —
to fiber the souls who meet another day in the lawnmower world.

~ Nora Bateson 2023