Order, chaos, calamity, order
How things aren’t still, and energy is always moving and changing…
ORDER
“A sequence or arrangement of successive things”
When I first saw the nature art of eco-artist Beth Adoette, who I met at a local arts and craft festival last year, I went crazy. She arranges leaves, seeds, flower petals, rocks, shells, sticks, and even legumes in gorgeous arrangements she calls “contemplative sacred circles.” Her nature art is then photographed and made into cards, prints, and more. We chatted. I gushed. I talked about my artwork. We made connections.
She inspired me. What if I take my own natural found objects, collected from so many different places over the years, and arrange and rearrange them into patterns? I started without having any real expectations and just wanting to experiment.
They were a bit lopsided, but no matter. The colors were mostly muted, but okay. Things wouldn’t stay still. Hmmm. Ephemeral nature art, that’s what I was making.
There’s only so much order I could make, if that’s even what I was trying to do. Creating order, ordering things in a certain way, deciding how I wanted things to be.
Things aren’t still and energy is always moving, anyway. Besides, I figured that being too still for too long makes things stuck and rigid.
But still, I wanted them to be more orderly. But they had their own ideas.
CHAOS
“A disorderly mass; a jumble”
After a sweltering hot and humid day, with just the right atmospheric conditions at play, a serious downburst swept through the DC region. Darkened skies and strong winds pushed heavy rain straight down, pummeling and flooding streets, toppling trees, and breaking power lines, all in a flash. And after it all, an eerie calm revealed the chaos.
I happened to be with friends at a Starbucks when it all happened.
Things aren’t still and energy is always moving. Maybe the jumbled mass of debris on our backyard patio was showing me another way.
Forget order. Chaos is wildly interesting. Ephemeral nature art, that’s what the downburst was making. Creating disorder, undoing things in no certain way, not deciding how things were to be.
CALAMITY
“An event that brings terrible loss, lasting distress, or severe affliction; a disaster”
More than just chaos, however, was that our beloved backyard garden suffered a major calamity from the downburst. An enormous branch (half the tree, actually) from our neighbor’s towering old silverleaf maple tree snapped and fell into our and another neighbor’s yard. It broke the utility pole, downed several power lines, crushed our fence, and took over our tiny backyard. It was really sad.
Two days later the power crew finally came. To do their work they had to clear the enormous downed tree branch on our side to free up the wires and get to the broken pole. They were rough, because they care about power, not about plants.
They cut up big branches and tossed them on top of the ferns and hellebores and vinca vine. They crushed the fragile red anise shrub, stomped on the common blue violet, and trampled on the nearly-blooming hostas. They destroyed my beloved back garden and made it into a tragic calamity.
And I couldn’t stop it. All I could think was that this was like emergency surgery, where I couldn’t get angry because they were resuscitating power back into our homes and therefore, back into our lives.
But I could feel it, as I walked back into my garden, taking in the destruction. Remembering all the work I did over 12 years to tend, steward, and care for this little plot of land. How I learned to pay attention, understand, and heal from my garden. How it took all my grief and tears after my mother’s death. How it had transitioned to become a shade garden and I finally understood that. How it told me to stop trying so hard. After a while I learned to listen to what the soil was saying, what the plants wanted, and how this little garden offered me so much. My heart ached and tears welled up in my eyes.
ORDER
“A sequence or arrangement of successive things”
The next morning I sat in the middle of my garden and was there for a while, taking in everything, feeling as if I was visiting a dear old friend after major surgery.
“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss and trauma and pain. I’m feeling it, too.” The lump in my throat got bigger and my nose started to tingle. The birds weren’t in the trees like they usually were and the squirrels were confused at not having their usual routes in the branches. I felt in a strange place, too, unfamiliar in my own beloved garden. Things aren’t still and energy is always moving, I reminded myself.
I looked up at the open sky where the huge branch of the silverleaf maple used to be. There was a breeze, and the branches towering above on the silverleaf maple swayed and their leaves shimmied. “I see you,” I heard. “It’s all going to be alright.”
I looked at the big pile in front of me where many of its smaller branches now lay, mixed with Japanese cedar and Japanese maple branches. How unique each of the leaves were, their textures and formations. Then it dawned on me to make ephemeral nature art with these!
Later that afternoon, with our neighbors we began the huge process of cleaning up the debris. We all worked together in each other’s yards, where the boundary between us was removed when the tree fell and broke the fence; where we needed each other to do the big things; where we made some sense of order to heal from the collective devastation.
Order in this way was very much about caring, rather than controlling. Caring for the land, tending and stewarding our collective places, and creating order for a new space after chaos and calamity.
I wonder what my beloved garden wants to show me now, and what we will discover together…
*
Listening...
LouLou
*definitions from https://ahdictionary.com/
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