Faith in the future part one. High confidence that, come high summer this will be a long row of green beans upon which we will feast and fill the dryer and the canner.
Faith in the future part two. 20 growing seasons ago that soil, it was thin layer of compacted subsoil. Compost and mulch. Mulch and compost. Time and patience. Patience and time.
Faith in the future part three - nitrogen fixation. Wisdom collaborative of microbes and plants -a billions of years old tech start up. That black dust in the bottom of my planting container is teeming with symbiotic bacteria just waiting for a beckoning bean rootlet.
Hello, the little guys will say, we are here. Hello back, will say the bean, let me grow you a little nodule in which you may live and to do your magic chemistry. And like that out of thin air (lieterally) - bio-available nitrogen.
Faith in the future part 4. Twenty years ago we bought these green bean seeds, but for a long time now we just leave one end of the row to make next years' seed.
Faith in the future part 5. No photo for this, but while I plant this row, two ten year old neighbors sit under the leafing-out Katsura tree (you know the one, with heart shaped leaves?), writing a book together.
"Beth, where would the apostrophe go in A Dragons Tale?" Hint: there are two dragons, and it is a story of the dragons nothing to do with a tail.
Faith in the future part 6. On my run today I noticed something I'd never seen before. High up in the broken off, mostly dead sugar maple tree (higher than my head, maybe 10 feet) something is growing. I stop and look. Young raspberry plants.
My guess: last summer a bird sat up there and pooped out a raspberry seed (quite possibly after feasting in my canes down in the valley down below, if a certain cedar waxwing had anything to do with it).
Now there's a little elevated raspberry platform, who ever heard of that? Maybe they will even fruit up there.
All to say, youth, wild nature, ancient intelligence, all has its ways of going on. The ridiculous, the cruel, the wasteful, the sacrilegious antics in the news, the shutting down of options and possibilities (what else is extinction anyway), all that is going on, to be sure.
But that's not all. It never has been. While some are degrading others are tending. While some are tearing things apart others are weaving strands together.
If the tending and weaving outpace the degrading and the tear, even by the smallest margin, that's the basis for faith in the future.
And there's a planet's worth of microbes, photosynthesizers, winged ones and ten years who could use all of our help on tilting that balance.
*ten year olds*
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