To be able to rise to 2020’s challenges, we can turn to nature to nurture ourselves

Paying attention to the news is exhausting. It feels like inhaling anxiety that no mask can filter out. Week after week, we just keep piling one gut-wrenching crisis on top of the next.

We are in a crisis of reckoning with deadly police brutality and systemic racism. We are in the midst of a still-growing global pandemic that has wounded our economy and compounded a long-building crisis of growing income inequality and deepening poverty. We are in a city- and county-declared crisis of homelessness. And of course there’s climate change – another existential threat that needs our immediate attention.

What could come next? Will Kim Jong Un attack South Korea? Will we have a catastophic wildfire season? Should we be keeping an eye out for a plague of locusts?

In front of a growing tent camp along Deschutes Parkway there’s a sign that says “Wanted: Hope for the future.” It seems safe to say that whoever made that sign speaks for all of us.

The blunt truth is that we are the hope. We have to rise to all these challenges, because the only alternative is perpetual despair. And it’s only by rising to the challenges that we can reduce our anxiety and recover our sense of joy and possibility.

Indeed, thousands of people are rising up against racism and stirring hope for a deeper, more authentic phase in the struggle to overcome racism and brutality. Participants in the recent protest march from Tumwater to the state Capitol were peacefully focused on achieving that purpose. And virtually every one of the 500 or so protesters was wearing a face mask and social distancing, in service to another purpose as well. That was the most upbeat group of people we’ve seen lately.

So action is one antidote to anxiety.

Another is the natural world.

As the 19th century poet Minnie Aumonier wrote “When the world wearies, and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden.”

And there’s so much to do in the garden. There are slugs to vanquish, weeds to pull, and salad greens to harvest and replant. But there is also the joy of simply watching plants grow and learning from them.

For instance, take the sweet little pink oxalis. It blooms profusely from May through October, but its flowers only open when the sun is out, proving that in the plant world as well as the human, some imperfections are inevitable.

There are also unavoidable garden conflicts, such as a contest between sweet woodruff and deep purple ajuga for a limited space. Right now the sweet woodruff is dominant, but the ajuga has cleverly infiltrated in and among it. Next year ajuga may have the upper hand.

This conflict brings to mind one of our nominations for best gardening book ever: “Onward and Upward in the Garden,” by Katharine S. White. It’s a collection of essays she wrote for The New Yorker, and one of them is titled “War in the Borders, Peace in the Shrubbery.” She writes about the “wars of aggression” in her perennial bed where “feathery white achilleas are strangling the far more precious delphiniums.” Nonetheless, she writes, “I comfort myself with the thought that at least I have achieved a mass effect, and that the flowers grow in drifts of color in a way that even Gertrude Jekyll, the author of ‘Colour in the Flower Garden,’ might have approved.”

“Colour in the Flower Garden” is another of our nominees for best garden book ever. Jekyll was an English artist who lived from 1843 to 1932, and whose failing eyesight made her turn to gardening instead. Bringing an artist’s sensibility to the soil, she designed over 400 gardens, and was also a quirky, entertaining and prolific writer.

So even if we’re exhausted or it’s raining, we can calm ourselves just reading about gardens, and anticipating the time, just a few weeks from now, when we’ll be eating perfectly ripe plums, picking wild blackberries for pies, and standing in the garden eating tomatoes still warm from the sun.

Even when we’re embroiled in crises, peace is available to us. We need to find it, dwell in it long enough to clear our minds, and then go back out into the world to repair what is broken and heal what hurts.