I don’t have much news for this week, besides to say I’m starting to work out what my Sapling Cage tour is going to look like this September and October. And if you missed the kickstarter, you can still preorder a signed copy of The Sapling Cage from Firestorm Books.
Will I See This Orchard Grow?
or: the non-futility of every action
A new friend of mine gave me a tree the first time I met him. It’s a butternut tree, sometimes called a white walnut, and to be honest I’d never even heard of a butternut tree when he gave it to me. “Plant it sometime next year,” he told me, because it’s just the littlest sapling right now, living in a pot, scarcely taller than the lavender that’s dying in the planter next to it on my porch.
If that tree survives my haphazard gardening long enough for me to plant it, and I have successfully built back the old deer fence well enough to protect it, and it doesn’t fall to “butternut canker,” it will grow roughly a foot per year. Who knows? Maybe by 2035 I will be eating butternuts.
This feels worth it to me.
I also spend my time reading the news and sincerely questioning whether or not I’ll have been rounded up into a camp before the decade is out.
I suppose I’ll care for this butternut regardless.
When I was coming up in radical politics, there was this quote that was on an awful lot of anarchist folk art. Usually the image was a tree with a circle-A superimposed. “Even if the world was to end tomorrow I would still plant a tree today.”
One day a few years ago while writing a different essay, I did some research into the origins of that quote. What I found at the time was:
It’s a paraphrasing of a quote misattributed to Martin Luther (the original protestant Martin Luther, not Martin Luther King, Jr., although plenty of people misattribute the quote to him as well). The original quote is something like “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” The earliest reference to it anyone can seem to find is from the German Confessing Church, a Christian movement within Nazi Germany that sought to challenge Nazi power. The quote was used to inspire hope, to inspire people to action.
Then I posted that essay (“How to Live Like the World is Ending,” which of course inspired my podcast). Then I learned that, well, I was wrong. The origin of this quote, and the idea behind it, is Islamic.
Anas ibn Malik reported that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "If the Final Hour comes while you have a shoot of a plant in your hands and it is possible to plant it before the Hour comes, you should plant it."
In essence, we are asked (by our anarchism, or by our faith, as if those are always distinct ideas) to continue to do the work we know that must be done even as the end of our lives, or the end of all things, is upon us.
It took me a long time to really wrap my head around that. I always liked the quote, and the idea, but I didn’t really practice it. I was too impatient. I wanted to see the results of my actions.
It’s probably for the best that the youth concern themselves with actions with direct results, just as it’s probably good that elders concern themselves with things that are timeless. It’s probably for the best that younger people take the lead in action, while older people offer wisdom and perspective. It’s not that the older people should make the decisions, but instead they should inform the decisions. “Listen to your elders” should probably not be understood to mean “obey your elders,” but instead, well, that we should listen to them.
I stand on the precipice of a great change in myself as I age. As I realize I’ve gone from youth to elder. In the great trinity of maiden-mother-crone I’ve certainly moved beyond maiden. But I care for plants and my dog and my books, not children, so I don’t know how to position myself between mother and crone.
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