Business traffic roars down the little two-lane highway that was my route, and the shoulders, where I try to walk, are very narrow.

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…Precisely because we are bringing the land into accordance with the savannah land-type we’re programmed for, we lose the ability to see what the land itself wants to be — its original and most natural shape. Walking through the residential sections of Crawfordsville and Lebanon, Indiana, it takes education and hard mental work to see past the lawns to what the land would look like if we hadn’t interfered.

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Kickapoo S.R.A. is a former strip mine. A local mining company spent most of the first half of the twentieth century digging coal out of the site with steam shovels, leaving behind a hole sixty feet deep. The State of Illinois has done an admirable job of revegetating and stabilizing the slopes on the edges of the hole, and it now makes a quite visually appealing lake. … But the forest growing in is still just a disturbed mess of secondary growth … I suspect that few if any of the rarer plants and animals have returned. And I doubt that many of the visitors picnicking and rubber tubing and canoeing there, realize that this is the case, or would understand its significance even if they knew. I find myself doing a lot of thinking about the ecological illiteracy of the general public, and the very real costs of this illiteracy….

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…Our Good News is recognizable by the fact that it is received by its hearers as Good News. In other words, the ones who hear it are likely to respond both with some sort of “aha” reaction — some sense of “this really changes my understanding of the world, and in consequence, the way I want to live my life” — and with some sort of pleasure at the nature of the news.

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A Friend … spoke of harmony, which is the term Baltimore Yearly Meeting has chosen in its theme — “Living in Harmony [with All God’s Creation]” — and contrasted it with control. He noted that these two things — harmony and control — cannot coexist; the exertion of control can at most lead to only a false illusion of harmony, while preventing true harmony from emerging. He said that to have genuine harmony with nature, we must be willing to let nature be what it is, respect it, and learn from it.

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It was all secondary and tertiary growth at Moraine View, a chaos of saplings crowding each other between older trees thirty or forty feet tall. But it was life as God designed it to be: green things working out their own destiny as they interacted, and providing habitat for animals, rather than merely green things genetically engineered to be nothing but fast raw material for sacks and silos of corn. … Every natural field and wood is a rich ongoing conversation between God’s creatures. Cornfields are not.

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After our meeting concluded, one Friend commented that the local Friends meeting had never really labored for discernment before. Another Friend said that the evening’s practice in discernment may have been one of the bigger benefits of the occasion.

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I healed to the point where I could bring my backpack to a meeting of my oversight committee at my monthly meeting. (They were very loving to me!) And I was able to go to meeting for worship, too, the day before yesterday, and it was wonderful….

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