The New York Times has just published a quite wonderful, and mournful, meditation on the lost flora of New York City by the Executive Director of N.Y.C. Wildflower Week.
I highly recommend taking a look, whether or not you live in NYC, as a motivating meditation on the importance of finding ways, large and small, to help replenish and restore this battered world.
"For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people—a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance."—Wm. Longgood, The Queen Must Die
3 comments:
I saw that Times feature and wondered if I was vividly remembering some of those flowers from my youth out in Queens because they seemed so familiar. I also remember painting a picture of a trillium. My mother (an artist) was teaching me, and this was one of my early efforts. There are a lot of good and lovely things that youngsters will never see (or paint or photograph or write poetry about) and not be able to remember decades later. Very sad.
Yes, the robbing of current and future generations of human, animal, and floral offspring a fully-realized biodiversity is one of the many crimes we're committing as a species right now. And it is heartbreaking and so frustrating.
On a happier vein, how I love the image of you as a small child drawing a trillium. There's a small stand of trillium in the woods across the road from us upstate and I always kneel beside them with joy and awe when they make their appearance each spring. Wildflowers have such magnificent personalities. I hope we can find ways to make the world more hospitable to them, and to us all.
I saw that Times feature and wondered if I was vividly remembering some of those flowers from my youth out in Queens because they seemed so familiar.
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