Tall Grass

May was a no-mow month. I have extended that for one patch in the backyard. When it comes time to rake leaves in the fall I’ll mow to facilitate spring-time snow melt that doesn’t drain well. between now and then it will be a place to observe it more natural state. This is a compromised state, given the many decades it has been regularly mowed.

Watching from a swing set on the deck, a swirling wind was highlighted by the tall shoots of grass bobbing their many-seeded heads. Pushed this way and that, the rhythm of the wind could be seen at a distance as well as felt on the face.

After watching this display for a while, the height of the grass came through. Apparently, year-after-year and decade-after-decade, this grass had been cut off, never maturing to carry its genetic heritage further. Like Malvina Reynold’s song lyric, “grass growing through cement”, this grass was ready to take advantage of no mower coming by. Year-by-year and decade-by-decade this grass not only held the sandy soil together but kept looking up, reaching up. This year its reach was not cut short. Trust in the unseen (an end to mowing) held steady. The courage of persistence is bearing fruit.

In a larger field we also see the wind that is blowing. A democracy, with all its inherent difficulties of clarifying its purpose of carrying conflicting visions of meaningful life, has been waving relatively free. This power and that (wind, fire, rain, hail, goats, gardens, and weeds) are no longer able to accommodate one another. No matter the external situation, there is an internal rot that will cause democracy to fail of its own.

Conceived as a communal endeavor (admittedly minus native people, slaves, women, the poor) the cry of independence from external control has morphed into cries of independence from one another within the body. Independence, individually based, betrays independence, of the community. Moral: democracy is not as persistent as grass and will blow away as its multiple roots no longer intertwine.