I’m grieving this morning. Grieving about two tiny, tiny lavender seedlings and ceremonial sage seedlings that are dying in my seedling tray because I exposed them to too much heat on Sunday. Lavender and sage are very challenging to get to germinate and I was so excited that I got some early growth. I was looking forward to potting them up in a month or so and nurse them along to maturity but now they are burnt-looking, collapsed little plant babies, and I’m upset about this.
I also grieving… the growing numbers of people out in the median strip at traffic lights holding up cardboard signs about their homelessness and hunger and children at home. Only a year ago I would see these people (when there were fewer) and think they were taking advantage of us drivers and there were ample homeless programs for them to tap. But they were just not tapping them and “why should I support them?” Occasionally I gave them some money or two baskets of blueberries to one younger woman… but I still did not take them that seriously. Until now as their numbers have grown.
I grieve for the waiter I had at Friendly’s last week who was let go from his engineering job last fall, now has a four month old baby, and is juggling waiting tables at Friendly’s during the day and waiting and busing tables at a slightly fancier tavern at night, crawling into bed exhausted each night and praying for that call for a new engineering job so he and his stay-at-home wife won’t eat away at their life savings any further.
I grieve for the people in Italy who have died and also those who lost loved ones and their homes in the earthquake in March. And for those in Pakistan, Iraq and Israel and Palestine who have died from carbombs or lost a daughter or son, or limb. Or sanity.
I grieve for the whales still slaughtered out at sea. Yesterday. Today.
The dolphins caught in nets.
The sharks mass murdered for their cartilage so someone can tennis a few more minutes longer.
The trees. The trees all over the world cut, chopped, burned, removed so our global appetite for monoculture and mahogany walls can be satiated.
I grieve.
And thus, today… I’ll get in my car and go work in another garden to assuage my wounded soul for the loss, the suffering…
The seedlings I tried to grow and killed from ignorance. I burned them. I did not know.
The ignorance… the ignorance… my ignorance.
Tags: death, deforestation, dolphins, earthquake, engineering, Friendlys, homeless, Iraq, Israel, jobless, kill, killing, lavender, Pakistan, Palestine, sage, seedling, sharks, slaughter, soul, trees, whales
