Uncertainty, perspective, and moss

 

I like David Frum.  He's one of a handful of right-leaning commentators, like Canada's own Andrew Coyne, whom I always read because I need to know how people who don't lean left are thinking.  We can't just abandon ways of thinking on the basis of a thinker's ideology:  they know stuff we don't and have perspectives we ignore.  So last Thursday, Bill and I were finally getting our trip to Victoria, cancelled in February because the day before we were to leave I came down with an unspeakably bad cold, one that's still causing me to crash with post-viral exhaustion. But enough about me.  Back to David Frum. I had grabbed up a handful of magazines to read on the plane, including one with his article "Why the COVID Deniers Won."  We can't just ignore COVID deniers, labelling them uninformed or ill-educated, partly because such labels simply make them more intransigent.  Keeping conversations alive:  that's what civil discourse does, and that's what David Frum does in his careful paragraphs on uncertainty:

"The onset of the pandemic was an unusually confusing and disorienting event.  Some people who got COVID died.  Others lived.  Some suffered only mild symptoms.  Others spent weeks on ventilators, or emerged with long COVID and never fully recovered.  Some lost businesses built over a lifetime.  Others refinanced their homes with 2 percent interest rates and banked the savings.

"We live in an impersonal universe, indifferent to our hopes and wishes, subject to extreme randomness.  We don't like this at all.  We crave satisfying explanations.  We want to believe that somebody is in control, even if it's somebody we don't like.  At least that way, we can blame bad events on bad people.  This is the eternal appeal of conspiracy theories.  How did this happen?  Somebody must have done it--but who?  And why?" 

Blaming bad events on bad people.  We're in the midst of that right now, with all the uncertainty that entails.  (I won't name names.  In our household, we call him "Oh-oh," short for "Orange Oaf.") Even a brief review of history will uncover authoritarian leaders who made changes to millions of peoples' lives because they thought something--the economy?  Science? War?--worked the way they believed.  I only had to go as far back as Margaret Thatcher to recall an example, though her creation of chaos was largely limited to Great Britain and the Falklands. A war for the Falklands?  Why?

But what does this have to do with a week in Victoria?  Just as I put down David Frum's illuminating article, we were flying low over the ocean from Vancouver to Victoria.  I can't explain what I saw on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, except to say that there were swirls and streaks of smooth, silvery water punctuated by a background that glittered.  How could you possibly explain something as complex as these ocean currents?  How could you explain the islands that lifted from the ocean floor--someone can, I'm sure.  But those islands are also subject to forces too complex to be explicable in the aggregate, like storms and erosion.  Or this fact:  trees put out thousands of seeds every year, but very few actually root.  Why this one and not that?  And how will this tree growing influence the microclimate of the island? 

When you go on holiday, you put aside the daily commitments and habits that can more or less rule your brain and your life and instead commit yourself to wonder.  To being observant.  To asking idle questions.  That is was spring in Victoria--daffodils everywhere, even naturalized on the edge of the highway and in every yard, along with grape hyacinths and a dozen other wildflowers I couldn't identify; tulip trees in blossom; deep red rhododendrons in full bloom; moss everywhere--made shifting gears easy. I'm good at finding the little back roads on Google Maps, so after a day of walking along several beaches in and near Victoria, we took the back roads out to Sooke for dinner.  That was the second dose of wonder for the day, after the ocean and the mountains.  Bill drives the twisty roads and I get the chance to look deep into the trees where the forest floor is carpeted with ferns.  Or to gaze in wonder at something I saw several times we drove out to Sooke and up to Duncan.  The highway would be bordered by sheer rock--the side of the mountain vertical and exposed.  And the rock was home to ferns, mosses, wildflowers, trees, small cataracts.  I wish I had a photograph for you, but these were not good places on the twisting roads to just stop and take a picture.  Imagine the outburst in Victoria gardens when spring arrives in that luscious climate where gardeners have laboured in the fall to plant every bulb that will thrive.  Then translate that to the side of a mountains.

The mosses were a particular wonder for me after reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss, which I highly recommend.  Actually, read everything she's written for the botany and the wisdom; she's a particularly philosophical companion during our traumatic time. She talks about the "ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure."  Mosses that grow on rock secrete acids that slowly turn rock to sand, allowing them patiently to thrive anywhere. There are 22,000 kinds of moss world-wide, occupying their individual niches. They are patience personified.  They can wait long periods for water.  They don't care how fast they grow and are willing to create their own ideal circumstances. And they create ideal circumstances for others.  Where there is moss, there is humidity.  They are perfect nurseries for baby trees.  They can pull moisture right out of the air and are the rain barrels of the trees they live on. They aid decay in the forest so it can renew itself. Where there is moss, the mycorrhizae that allow trees to talk to one another and share resources flourishes.

It wasn't just the moss, but everything growing out of the sides of solid rock that gave me the perspective I need right now.  Looking at these unlikely greenhouses, these massive vertical slabs of rock covered in plants, I said to myself "The earth wants life here and is inventive enough to make it happen."

Like you, I can have a pretty dark view of life right now, particularly as I look at the appallingly stupid willfulness and cowardice of politics south of the border.  But that's not the only place where disaster thrives. Yes, in spite of the mosses, we're destroying our planet, possibly making it uninhabitable for ourselves.  Yes, the IDF has gone back into Gaza and is purposefully killing aid workers. Yes, Trump and Putin are gambling with the lives of millions of Ukrainians with their awkward bromance.  What is it that allows people not to think about the consequences of their actions in the lives of others? Has Oh-oh even thought about what it's like to lose  your job and then multiplied that by hundreds of thousands? Oh, I forgot.  He's a narcissist.  What makes narcissists?  He just tells us it may take a few years, and his great America will arrive, made solely by him, he says. How much hunger and despair will also have been created?

But uncertainty is also a principle alive on our planet, a principle that gives rise to beauty and wonder. Do what you can.  Buy Canadian.  Elect the party you think will be most effective in tending to the needs of the unemployed while Trump has an explosion that none of his advisors has the courage to question. You know, I've almost gotten myself to the point where I think the human race could disappear, and I'd be okay with that. I'd miss the art we create and engage with.  I'd miss the friendly conversations that enliven coffee shops and show us at our most compassionate and curious. But I 'd trust the mosses to experiment their away around to a second draft.