Looking for Peace in the Garden

From The Flower Child’s Garden Planet:

Everyone knows who the flower children were. The iconic photo of the girl putting a daisy in the gun barrel of the trooper at the peace demonstration says it all. Peace and love sums it up nicely. 

That girl has probably grown up and has grandchildren, if not great grand children by now, but the message is as fresh as this seasons’ daisies.

Around the same time as the iconic flower child photo appears, the humans from Earth first see an actual photograph of the whole Earth from space, another moment marking photo. It is the beginning of an era.

We are all globalists now. The time of taking sides is passing because you can’t take sides when you know the world is round.

And what goes around, comes around. And around. Everything is not just connected now, as it always was, really. We are connected visibly, in real time. Causes and effects are accelerating. Images, each said to be worth a thousand words, now fly around the world by the billions daily. 

A single meme, story, event, or image that once produced a wave of reaction and response, now is just another blip in the roaring tide. The cacophony is now a constant storm on a choppy sea. Even the big waves come one after another, without time to recover or process the impact.

I once nearly drowned. I got stuck while swimming in the surf off the coast of Mexico, in the place where the waves repeatedly broke over me and pounded me into the rocks. Each time I stood up, I was hit again. The water was not deep, but the waves were big, and I was little.  If not for the big strong Mexican man who noticed my plight and pulled me out of that zone, I would not be here writing this now.

The world feels like that to me now, as I sit here, in the eye of an enormous human caused climate change storm, as the waves of global pandemic crash over us, and the flames of firestorms across the West lick at the door of my town. We are in the stage in this drama now of realizing that things have seriously gone awry and we must do something. 

We need help. We have got to get ourselves back to the garden. All one planet garden. If there is not rescue, things will not get better. We gotta stop the way we’re going, or we just might arrive. We long for peace. The answer is still love.

“The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.” -Michael Pollan