OK, HERE'S THE DEAL WHETHER YOU GARDEN OR NOT

Everything out there is changing on us. Big time. Glaciers melting, economies tanking, civilizations colliding, and town halls sounding like Robespierre's old reign-of-terror.....!

But here's the deal. The dynamics of change is much closer and much more significant than those explosive headlines. It's more those subtle yellows and rusts seeping into our backyard gardens and nearby parks. Nature's ancient way of stirring our consciousness to what it means to watch another summer slip through our reluctant fingers.

It's not yet fall, but it's no longer summer. It's that perennial point on the celestial calendar when we are compelled to admit life never remains in full, lush bloom. What is must go, what we love we must say farewell, what is warm and lazy must yield to the cool and challenging. Farmers understand this, because they live inside nature. We, glassed & steeled in city-dwellers, live outside nature. And yet, we can't afford to ignore its philosophical whispers.

I can't speak for you, but here's what I hear out there in my August.

The gardens of ideas I've been enjoying can't live forever. They regularly call for weeding, pruning, replanting. Getting too comfortable with anything in our lives can become the ether of complacency. Nice to value what you have; indispensable to recognize when its value has been spent.

Something else these subtle signs tell me. While I cherish what I have grown over a lifetime, I must at times admit our lifetimes are changing. New gardeners are showing up with new seeds and new applications. That doesn't mean I have nothing to teach them; but the best teaching is always a two-way affair.

The gradual drying and browning of my Huckleberry summertime may at first look like a death. But isn't that very much like what the fetus must sense when it's yanked from the womb of its comfort zone? Hey, it's cold and white and metallic out here! What happened to my beautiful world! Of course, the answer is that the fetus has died to one world only to be born into a new and vaster one.

Modern, sophisticated city-dwellers -- surrounded with all the pomp and pomposity of their gadgets -- are temped to miss these signs. We're too easily seduced into believing we run the world! we understand its secrets! our science has cracked all the codes. Maybe that's why so many prophets are killed, why so many reforms are refused. And, yes, why so many young ones are dismissed as "still wet behind the ears."

Surveying my fading summertime, I'm sometimes reminded we old gardeners could use some of their fresh wetness. This is not an either/or moment in history. Simply the eternal laws of nature whispering to old and young alike: Work with me.