We are in a cold time. Everything is brittle and liable to breakage. Despair comes so easily.
A few days ago, it was warmer, but still we were pummeled. The wind roared down Commercial Street like a big-ass garbage truck, rampant, creating its own weather as it moved along: a force. The few people on the street walking from the west were severely hunched into it, as if in a death march. From the east, they scampered out in front in a vaudevillian dance, as if a pit bull had them by the seat of their pants. It refused to be ignored.
Things flew through the air: sand, of course, our sand — the gist of our existences — and dust, I guess, and detritus, that catchall word for anything we can’t name. An empty cup twirled across the macadam with the grace of a ballet dancer, although its tattered leotard was Styrofoam. A lone gray gull defied the elements, sailing across the sky, with my heart trailing after it.
I myself, looking skyward, was on an errand. Who isn’t? But whatever that errand was — I remember it now; now I forget — paled in significance to just being there, just going wherever I was going. Just getting by.
It’s December, of course, that cursed month at the end of what we declare to be our year, however artificial that determination is. Our tilted planet’s allotment of light is meager now, and even in these artificial times, when we rob the Earth of its fossilized treasures so we can make cappuccinos at home or watch stupid movies on our couches, we feel the loss of light.
It is a special time, for all that.
Hunching myself down the street in the middle of town, my eyes now necessarily cast downward so as not to take this old body into a fall, I looked upon a weed sprouting out of a crack between the concrete stairs of a shop and the sidewalk. It was small but defiantly green in this gray afternoon, and it announced itself to me. This is admittedly my perception, because I know this lowly weed has spoken to no one in all its existence. But on this day, I needed it, and there it was. I did not know then but do now that it was a species of knotweed, probably prostrate knotweed (Polygonum aviculare), and I did not especially care about the name.
I walked on. By Marine Specialties, I came upon another sprout of greenery — tiny but also bright green, known by its charming appellation as chickweed (Stellaria media), the common name I assume to be associated with poultry. Later I came upon other struggling plants wedged into or next to asphalt, brick, or concrete. All weeds, for want of a better word.
Weeds have a great deal to teach us, if in fact plants can teach people and people can learn from plants. Who knows? It is a delicate proposition. Long ago, humans were more susceptible to the lessons nature provided and in fact lived by those lessons, before the primitive animist philosophies were stamped down (but not entirely out) by the now dominant theistic creeds. Picture the early man or woman stooping to observe the rugged little plant by the side of the trail and listening to its story. Those days are gone, perhaps, but we can borrow those mindsets to our advantage.
The species I mentioned are all probably invasives — they all came from somewhere else — and they are all survivors in a hostile world because they have aligned themselves with our human cultures. The people in our country without proper documents survive as well, in spite of the obstacles they face, and they get by because they have found a niche in our incomprehensible economy and serve a purpose. They are just people, walking into the wind.
Flowers blossomed on the edges of Dachau, and they blossom now at Chernobyl. They are value-free and nonjudgmental. In fact, some green thing will sprout upon the ruins of our civilizations. That is not the point. We are alive now, in this bleak holiday season, in this time of possible pending disaster. As one journalist proclaimed: “No overstatement is possible.” What can we do now to deal with the hand we have been dealt: when our many neighbors in this nation have chosen a path that defies not only common sense and belief in our institutions but decency itself?
That weed in the sidewalk crack lives on a pinch of dirt and withstands the trauma of traffic. It asks no favor, hangs on, and holds fast. It teaches us tenacity.
We would do well to learn from it. Hang on.
