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Looking for the Future Among the Meadow Grasses
Now the Summer is coming to fruition.The heat is finally in motion.
August upholds the season’s reputation,
as July did not.
I sweltered through a perfect Summer Saturday, and found it full of Life. Birds that had been reticent while nesting, or simply absent, are now abroad again, the new broods swelling their numbers. Insects abound, despite the pesticides, and herbaceous plants seem to spring up magically, growing by leaps and bounds.
The Wildflower Meadow is coming into its glory, and all of these phenomena are well displayed there.
To hear me speak of the Meadow, you might think there’s more to it than there is. It’s just a small field, a strip, really, on a gentle slope that falls down to the North Woods, and the Loch. The Bridle Path, and a paved transverse road run along the crest of the slope, and there are usually joggers, bikers, and police vehicles going by. It’s not isolated, by any means, but if you look in the right direction, you can certainly get lost in it.
The mown lawn is an oddity of human culture. More than suburban status symbol, grass is linked to our ascendancy: the harvest grains we coaxed from wild grasses were a prerequisite for the expansion of civilization, and urbanism. But let a patch of open ground grow undisturbed, and it won’t resemble a putting green. You may be surprised at what comes up, and how fast.
That's the idea behind the Wildflower Meadow. Historically, the Park has been pruned and manicured, with little left between woodland and lawn, save for some ornamental flower beds and shrubbery. The Meadow has been allowed to grow out, as a transition zone between field and forest. Actually, it's carefully tended, and the native wildflowers and "weeds" have been purposefully planted, to simulate a more "natural" landscape. This effort is not without its ironies. Meadows are indeed transitional, unstable, environments, and what appears to be an overgrown field requires as much attention as any lawn, in order to retain its desired character.
Shifting ideas of Nature have shaped the Park over the years. I'm generally in sympathy with the current management philosophy, which embraces a practical, rather than aesthetic, naturalism. Local plants, and a less manicured (hence wildlife-friendly) landscape are worthy values, though they are sometimes given more lip service than action. The Meadow is the most successful of only a handful of similar projects in the Park. That a “back-to-nature” naturalism should be fashionable is an index of a growing green consciousness, which is rooted in a deeper, essentially spiritual, trend, of which my practice is also a reflection (and reflection is my practice).
In the Meadow, scale changes.
It was just a stretch of hillside in the Winter, without a hilltop. A striated expanse of flattened grasses; a few dry stalks still standing. You could walk across it in two minutes, and think nothing of it. Even in Spring it’s slower to recover its verdure than are the surrounding woods. But in the last few weeks it’s reached eye level, with stands of Pigweed and Timothy; Pokeweed and Daisy; Asters; Coneflowers; Goldenrods; and others; more than I can name. I try to learn them as I can, which usually means when they flower, and you can pin them down in the field guide.
Just now, it’s Joe-Pye Weed leading the way.
When the plants match your own height, you begin to appreciate the bug’s-eye view of things. I feel I’m on the verge of entering their world physically, wending among the stems and blossoms, but the voyage can only be undertaken optically. Employing the binocular, you can see deep into the scene, without disturbing it. By changing the focus, one can move among shifting layers of vegetation, seemingly seeing straight through tangles that cannot be otherwise traversed.
Here is a whole other world. It’s almost like an undersea domain. Is gravity held in abeyance? Arthropods move up, or down, or sideways, in powered flight, or clambering upon the foliage, even floating through the air, along with pollen grains, and tiny silken-tasseled seeds. Birds dart in and out, picking off seeds and insects. Sunlight renders leaves translucent, and any breeze sets all to shimmering, destroying depth perception.
It’s a space allowing any vector you can imagine.
But even here, amid the insect buzz and chirping birds,
distraction.
An alien sound.
It’s technology on the hoof.
Yes, cell phones are everywhere, even in the Wildflower Meadow.
Some will complain about cell phone etiquette, (which sounds like a good idea), but much of the irritation caused by these devices is simply that of change, like the itch one feels at the site of a healing wound. At least that’s the optimistic view, but it must be acknowledged that cell phones, and other expanding communication technologies, have genuinely altered the Park experience. This is something that has happened within recent years, and you don’t even have to be using one of the things (I don’t) to be affected.
In fact, all of social space is changing in response to our accelerating technological unfoldment, but it used to be that the Park, in particular, was a place where you went in order to get away; to be out of communication.
That’s no longer the case.
If you so wish (and many do), you can be in touch anywhere, any time, and all the time.
This condition seems to be a fait accompli, and it transforms the nature of public space.
It used to be that public space was governed by its very publicness. Actions and attitudes were conditioned by the shared nature of the space. The fact that the space was open to all provided the orientation point for the individual. It was indeed an “open” space, in which there could be a center of attention.
Now, everyone radiates their own private space, and attention is cast in all directions, without a central focus. Absent parties are brought into contact, while those present are irrelevant to one another, no longer sharing a generalized, public, viewpoint. The expansion of multiple interconnected private spheres is in the process of filling up the once open space we all shared together, or squeezing it out of existence. The result is no longer open, but packed full of connections and cross purposes.
This is not so much good, or bad, as it is simply what we are doing, but it does seem to me that the condition we are achieving, while unlike our historical circumstances, has much in common with what goes on in the Meadow, or under the Ocean, or in any cubic foot of brambles.
Such spaces are not empty zones, in which something might happen, but highly charged continuums, in which all sorts of things are happening simultaneously, at close quarters.
We shall be predicated on what we select, out of a density of happenstance.
All of life shall be a meadow.
As I said, this is the optimistic view.
It is, however, in accord with my own Gnosticism, which understands our progress as a vector intent on returning to the Original state, which was a spaceless density, containing all possibilities.
If this is where we came from, and where we are going, one may wonder at the purpose of the open, public space, which our history has passed through.
What is this bubble in the timestream which we have lived in?
To employ an entomological metaphor, let me suggest a cocoon.
A moth larva spins itself a protective space, a silken bubble in its environment, where it can undergo its metamorphosis undisturbed. Just so, Culture has been the extruded silk which the human animal has used to create a protective space, insulating ourselves from the ever intersecting purposes of the natural world.
Within this zone, we have been shedding our old form of being, or rather, constructing a new one.
We have become a different animal altogether.
Today’s rate of convergence suggests that we are nearing our hour of emergence.
But don’t hold the phone.
And don’t think that my time spent in the Meadow is an escape, a getting-away-from:
I’m getting ready for the Future.