Not About a Result

Dear Friends,

Putting together our last week's meditation ("Not for myself am I healed") and our earlier focus on the lack of outward efficacy that plagues climate activism, I wanted to remind us all of a telling exchange between Bill Moyers and W. S. Merwin.  

Moyers had been struck by a line in a Merwin poem:
 

On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.

Now Merwin was a great gardener,  also a restorer of wilderness and of palm tree species in particular.  (Do go see Stefan Schaefer's documentary, "Even Though the Whole World is Burning," which you can find here.)  In an interview, when Moyers asked Merwin about this puzzling line, he asked with a kind of practical incomprehension, bordering almost on irritation:  If the world will end tomorrow, why would you plant a tree that won't even grow and that no one will ever see?

Merwin had a great answer:
 

It's not about a result.  It's about a relationship.

We are cultivating a relationship with the natural world so loving that we would take care of it, collaborate with it, delight in it, even if all the parties concerned are soon to go extinct.  How can we get that loving?    

As so often recently, we will bring war and politics into the mix in today's meditation: impossible to leave them out.

with love,
Michael