Home » Plants & Animals » Weeds & Wild Plants » This Good Earth that We're On

This Good Earth that We're On

© Barbara Hall

(much of the following is printed through the kind permission of The Nimham Times Magazine of Putnam Valley, NY nimham@highlands.com and the title, I realize is a line from a delicious song by by Jim Dawson from LONG ago.......

Earth Day....... New Holiday........... Do you get the day off? Kids off from school? Banks closed? Do you spend weeks sending out Earth Day cards? Wrapping Earth Day presents? And how about that big Earth Day party. No, huh? If I've noticed correctly, it's all we can do to pull off a plant sale.

And just think about the Holidays we DO celebrate. Valentine's Day is a real drag for everyone who just doesn't happen to be in love at the moment. Christmas kind of doesn't apply to all the folks who actually celebrate Hannukah or Russian Christmas or Kwanza though we secularize it all to rather sweep up just about everybody. Thanksgiving is an American Holiday, Easter is pretty religious. Memorial Day? Presidents' Day? Hey. Any good reason for a mattress sale.

But WHAT does every last one of us now and all the way down through history have in common? Yeah, nice planet we live on! Incredibly ASTONISHING planet we live on! What is WRONG with this picture?

I, for one, plan on NEVER getting over my astonishment at the wonder of this living ball of STUFF we inhabit. Just the other day I was on line at a drive-up window and I looked down at the hopelessly drive-up-window landscaping made up of chipped wood and a few bedraggled shrubs sucking up all our exhaust fumes. There at the feet of the bedraggled shrubs was a whole herd of Sheep sorrel. A weed to most, but some of us recognize it as one of the four herbs in Essiac , said to be something close to a cure for some kinds of cancer. Welcome to our planet, where cures for cancer sprout up spontaneously amidst the chipped wood and bedraggled shrubs at a drive-up window. Makes perfect sense to me.

How patient she is with us, this Good Earth we live on. We stomp and destroy and push and upset the balance and she closes her eyes and settles back down -- to a point. We puzzle and study and research and try to figure it out when we should just be WATCHING. It's all right there . It all works. It's all renewing, if only we'd leave it alone.

The copyright of the article This Good Earth that We're On in Weeds & Wild Plants is owned by . Permission to republish This Good Earth that We're On in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.