I'd tried okra this year for the first time, and pulled the last of the plants from the soil a few days ago. That included seedsaving from the dried-out pods, which is one of the easiest and most satisfying things imaginable. The pods even kinda sorta open up for you, each chamber splitting neatly, hinting at the seedstock within. It just requires a little twist of a blade, and...pop! Out tumble a dozen or so dun brown spheres, looking for all the world like misshapen ball-bearings. Then you move on to the next chamber, and the next, until from a single pod you've received fifty or sixty potential future plants. I dedicated three beds to my okra experiment this season, two four-by-eight and one four by four, and just one pod gives enough seed to do that three times over. The ten pods I used for my seedstock gave me enough seed to turn the entirety of my property into an okra patch. I'd have to cut down all of our trees, and level our house, so that's not going to happen. Still, it's such an impossible potential abundance.
Life is like that, because life has to be like that. If it wasn't, if it didn't produce wildly and wantonly, it would die, because nature is utterly without mercy. Ten of my twenty okra plants never produced a single seed, as they were devoured by deer, every leaf consumed, the stalks left standing stark and denuded in the soil after two straight weeks of rain flushed my repellent spray from the leaves. Though okra is heat and drought tolerant, we also had another record setting hot-spell this summer, which stalled growth, and several more of my plants just never went to seed at all.
Elsewhere in my garden, other plants also struggled. My bush beans, usually prolific, were stunted by the heat. My butternut squash, devoured by chipmunks as soon as the first sprouts rose from the soil. The squash, I replanted, and replanted, and replanted, but chipmunk hunger drives them around even the most carefully constructed barriers and netting. I only saw a yield of three modest squash, about one-fifth of what had been normal. My sunflowers, which have graced a corner of my garden for years? All but a single seed-head were devoured by squirrels. Still, I have seed for next year, and am plotting and planning necessary adaptations.
The only way living things survive is to spam themselves into the world, producing and adapting and producing and adapting until finally something sticks.
Before the modern era, we humans were like that, too.
I was reminded of that recently, as I prepared a sermon on that little passage about Jesus blessing the children. It's a sweet little passage...right up until you think about the why of it.
Kids used to be, well, they weren't the gravitic center of adult life the way they are now. They just didn't last long enough. We had babies, and they died, and had babies, and they died. You could be healthy, and well fed, the offspring of wealth and privilege, but still, children died. Just ask Mary Todd Lincoln about that one, eh? Or ask my ancestors, literate souls, who recorded the losses of their beloved children in their diaries with a stoic acquiescence. Most human beings who came into the world didn't make it to ten years of age. We tried everything we could, until we found modern medicine and penicillin and pasteurization.
Absent functioning antibiotics, unspoiled food, and effective vaccines, life was consistently, relentlessly short.
For the last few Sundays now, I've also been leading a group through a thought-provoking book about forgiveness, and about the central place of mercy and grace in Christian faith. As we discussed the notable absence of forgiveness in Western pagan culture, the thought came to me: well, I mean, forgiveness isn't particularly natural, either. Nature doesn't let us make errors. Choose wrongly, and it "corrects" our mistakes by removing us from existence.
We've forgotten this, clearly, as the voices of our ancestors are drowned out by the cacophany of our short-attention-span consumerism and the synthetic realities of social media influencer culture. Nature still exists, and we've forgotten that nature, once provoked, gives no quarter. It is utterly unforgiving, ruthlessly exterminating the weak, the unproductive, the foolish, and the forgetful.
Death is, after all, a natural remedy.
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