The exuberant chittering of Chimney Swifts takes me back to my childhood. They animated the sky and were a prominent part of the soundtrack of summer. Now, as I tend to my summer garden, there are far fewer Chimney Swifts gracefully coursing through blue skies, but they are still as exuberant as ever. They give us reasons to hope.
In a recent interview for Orion Magazine, Wendell Berry described how he remains optimistic.
“That’s my argument in favor of this world, against the determinists. I depend on what I know of human goodness but also on the flowers and the butterflies and the birds. The otters and the swallows — a lot of their life is just spent having a hell of a good time. The animals, so far as I can understand them, have a great deal to say in favor of life. It’s a good world, still.”
We can embrace a hopeful perspective in the small daily acts of life that connect us to our patch of earth. The challenge is to stay tuned into positive experiences and allow them to take root in our consciousness, where they can become a vitalizing force. Barry Lopez was familiar with this force, which he described in his essay entitled An Intimate Geography.
“Intimacy with the Physical earth apparently awakens in us, at some wordless level, a primal knowledge of the nature of our emotional and biological attachments to physical landscapes. Based on my own inquiries, my impression is that we experience this primal connection regularly as a diffuse, ineffable pleasure, experience it as the easing of a particular kind of longing.”
My garden makes me hopeful on a daily basis. I trace the graceful line of a cucumber vine as it flows to the light. The vine is woven into the trellis and woven into my life like the green threads of ideas that weave people together across centuries. This connection to humanity and an ancient way of being is why we are all hardwired for connection. I follow the thread and notice a honeybee working a cucumber flower. He twists and turns, pushes his head further into the flower, shifts his position, and repeats. He is working hard to get food. We make the same movements when working hard at some tasks. I can see myself in the bee.
I take comfort in the familiarity of my garden. The perimeter fence has broken down, and the rabbits now share the garden with me. Walking down the central path, I recognized the sound of a small rabbit running through the violet leaves. I used to chase the rabbits out of the garden, but now, I stop and watch them. The young rabbit in my garden must think I am here to admire him. He lets me get close; sometimes, he steps on my shoe as he hops past me. I also get to watch him eat, which is interesting. He has distinct preferences and will sniff leaves and search out clover and other preferred plants. If I plant vegetables that rabbits like to eat, I put up a chicken wire fence around them. This works well most of the time and lets me enjoy the company of rabbits. It is nice when you can turn a source of stress into a pleasant experience. Sometimes, all it takes is a subtle shift in our thoughts.
There is real power in positive thinking. The stories we tell ourselves shape who we are and what we become. Maria Popova describes how “The thin line between agency and victimhood is drawn in how we tell those stories.
Our ability to embrace positive thinking is buoyed by our ability to be hopeful. One of the most keen and nuanced purveyors of hope is Rebecca Solnit. She has a practical view of what it means to be hopeful.
“The hope I am interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainty with openings.”
I find hope in the most unlikely places. I was pulling my tomato vines back inside their cages when I noticed missing leaves. I paused, studied the leaves, and noticed little brown barrel-like droppings. I looked up above them and came face-to-face with a Tomato Hornworm. I was surprised and ecstatic. His tiny arms were clasped under his chin, and he looked, for all the world, like he was praying.
He looked serene, sleeping under a leaf in a little self-made opening in the canopy. When I leaned in and took a closer look, I noticed beautiful white diagonal stripes paired with a false eye on each muscular segment of his rippling body. He even had tiny, shiny, star-like spots that matched the look of a tomato leaf. He was overlaid with a stunning cosmic camouflage.
He brought back memories of when I was farming in the early 2000s. We had so many hornworms on our tomatoes we had to pick them off the plants. Unfortunately, I have not seen a hornworm on our tomato plants in years. They just disappeared. The reappearance of these future moths feels like a small but significant victory, given the decline of insects worldwide. I planted wild tobacco last year for the moths, and here they are on my tomatoes. It could be a coincidence, or it could be that with a little forethought and care, we can help some insects increase rather than decline.
The fact that we have Tomato Hornworms means we now have Five-spotted Hawk Moths (Manduca quinquemaculata) in our yard. Despite their nocturnal ways, these moths can capture our imagination. Some Hawk Moths have 14-inch-long tongues. There are 11,000 species of moths in the US, and 160,000 have been identified worldwide. Scientists estimate another 200,000 may exist but are unknown to us. To put this into perspective, there are 17,500 species of butterflies worldwide.
If their sheer abundance is not intriguing enough, consider another relatable habit. Hawk Moths pollinate the flowers of Downy thorn apple, which contains tropane alkaloids in the nectar. These alkaloids have an intoxicating effect on the moth. After sipping the nectar, Hawk Moths fly erratically and become uncoordinated. Despite the impairment the nectar causes, the moths return to the flowers to consume more nectar. In other words, moths get drunk, and they like it.
Imagine a tipsy person and a tipsy moth stumbling into each other in the wee hours. Their barriers are down, a conversation ensues, and connections are made. The moth leads the person to the light … of the nearest porch. A small slice of the mystery that surrounds us is made real through their fellowship.
The recent arrival of Hawk Moths in our yard is one more example of insect diversity being supported by increasing native plant diversity. We recently seeded half of our front yard with a shady woodland seed mix from Prairie Moon Nursery in Minnesota. Wildflowers now crowd the border with our garden.
As I look beyond our garden and over the tall, shaggy carpet of woodland wildflowers under the pin oak in our front yard, I see a sea of tidy green lawns off in the distance. The manicured lawn is part of the old story we tell ourselves, and it is losing its grip on us. Walking through our neighborhood, I see more yards with gardens and native plants. Life is returning, and a new story is taking root.
I can imagine one of my neighbors walking around their yard with a spray bottle of RoundUp when a Hawk Moth appears and hovers in front of them. The buzzing wings capture their attention, and as they make eye contact, something within them shifts. They relax a little, their hand opens, and the spray bottle slips from their grasp.
I have faith in the power of Hawk Moths; they are charismatic insect megafauna. I returned to my garden the next morning to find two more Tomato Hornworms on an Italian heirloom tomato plant, which is not as vigorous as my other plants. I watched the three-inch caterpillar vacuum up leaves and small green tomatoes at an alarming rate. The rhythmic munch, munch, munch of his jaws was captivating and disconcerting. My tomato plant was disappearing before my eyes.
After a few minutes of watching the caterpillar, I decided to do an experiment. I removed the caterpillar from the tomato plant and placed him on a Bitter Nightshade plant growing in my raspberries. I checked the next morning, and the caterpillar was happily munching on a leaf. He was noticeably bigger, and ¼ of the leaves on the nightshade were gone. This seems like a good solution. The hornworms can reduce weed pressure in my garden, and the tomatoes get to keep their leaves.
Later that afternoon, I was hiking through a local sand prairie and approached a big patch of Bee Balm. There was a lot of insect activity, and I was watching a wasp when I heard whirring wings. I thought it was a hummingbird but was surprised to see a type of hawk moth called a Hummingbird Clearwing foraging on the Bee Balm.
I slowly walked up to the edge of the patch of Bee Balm. The moth was moving in my direction. When she got within ten feet of me, I raised my camera, and she flew up and hovered right in front of my face. After a few seconds, she slowly dropped back into the Bee Balm and continued foraging four feet away from me. I took that as a sign that she trusted me, and I should trust moths.
My very hungry caterpillar dilemma illustrates the uncertainty inherent in life. There is no way to know the power and influence of those tiny whirring wings. Maybe a chance sighting of a Hawk Moth will inspire one more neighbor to plant native plants. Rebecca Solnit discusses this aspect of hope, where opportunity exists within uncertainty.
“Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimist s take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters, even though how and when it may matter, who, and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”
My hope resides in dappled light on the margin of a chewed leaf. It has a tenuous existence, but it is nurtured by our collective power, which can be brought into the light of awareness by telling hopeful stories, embodying a positive way of being, and holding tight to the green threads that connect us.
Something mysteriously formed,
Born before heaven and earth
In the silence and the void,
Standing alone and unchanging
Present and in motion
Being great, it flows
It flows far away.
Having gone far, it returned
The softest thing in the universe
Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
Lao Tzu
Just as the winged energy of delight
Carried you over many chasms early on,
now raise the daringly imagined arch
holding up the astounding bridges.
Miracle doesn’t lie only in the amazing
living through and defeat of danger;
Miracles become miracles in the clear
achievement that is earned.
To work with things is not hubris
when building the association beyond words;
denser and denser the pattern becomes –
being carried along is not enough.
Take your well, disciplined strengths
and stretch them between two
Opposing poles. Because inside human beings
is where God learns.
Rainer Maria Rilke
This is beautiful, Bill! I consider myself fortunate that I can draw hope from the smallest things in nature, too. Recently, a dragon fly landed on my shirt and came with me into an art gallery, not flying off until we were outside again. It was as though a faraway friend had joined me on this visit.
Yesterday I saw an odd looking "wasp" in my mountain mint. I snapped a few photos and last night, after a Google search, I found out that it is not actually a wasp, but is a fly...a Clubbed Mydas Fly! I am continually buoyed by the diversity of life in my field and find that it can assuage my "eco-grief".
Last night I also watched a short film on the Aldo Leopold Foundation website by their own Maia Buschman called "Never To Revisit, Aldo Leopold, Eco-grief, and the Value of Wilderness". I find that your essay and this film have a lot in common. Check it out!