Every morning when I get up and open the blinds near my desk, I take a moment to peer into my terrarium. It's changed since I planted it in the fall: some of the mosses have died back while others seem quite happy; the liverworts are thriving; there's a green film of algae growing on the beige shelf fungus, and the fern has put out three adventurous fronds. A small gnat seems to live inside the glass, even though it could easily escape. I think the moisture level has been too great for the lichens, and not quite enough for the moss. There's life and growth happening, as well as decay. I'm doing my best to take care of this little world for which I'm entirely responsible, drawing on a certain amount of knowledge and common sense, but the fact is...a lot of the time I'm guessing. Should I slide the top open a little more, or less? Should I mist the terrarium today, or wait? I make decisions based not only on what I see, but on the smell of the interior, the dampness on the pebbles, and the warmth and humidity I sense when I quickly put my forefinger inside, close to the soil.
This little experiment has filled me with renewed awe for the balance of life on our planet, an even greater awareness of its fragility, and the amazing harmony with which these small life forms colonize a tree stump in nature to form a garden far more beautiful and complex and self-sustaining than anything I could ever create.
I'm also learning something about myself: the strong but almost subconscious desire I had to create a little world, care for it properly, and see it thrive during this time when almost nothing in our real world -- where I am the gnat, but can't escape -- seems controllable or even predictable.
I suppose we all want that. Nobody really likes chaos, or fear, or one change on top of another to which we have to adapt. We'd like our homes to be comfortable, secure places of refuge during this time, and instead they've sometimes felt like traps. We haven't been able to pick up the glass globe in which we're living and give ourselves or others what we need; instead we've sometimes felt like hapless inhabitants looking out as some large invisible hand shakes our world around, turns it upside down, and surrounds it with toxins or threatens it with violence.
Nevertheless, this globe on my desk is somehow very serene, and reminds me every day of beauty and continuity: the moss stays green, the fern stretches and grows even while storms blow outside my window, bending trees and snapping branches with the weight of heavy snow and ice. Here, last fall's dill blossom has dried into an explosion of tiny yellow flowerheads; the brass Peruvian llama stands watch; the snail shell from Mycenae doesn't know it's traveled in my pocket across two oceans; the collection of seed pods now form a sculpture-park in miniature, but they all once bore life.
As hard as this period of time has been, I appreciate that it's forced me to slow down, and look, and think, and try some new things. This was a different sort of watercolor for me to paint, for instance, and that's good. Sitting at this desk, talking to some of you via Zoom or through this blog or various messages, I've realized more than ever how connected we all are, how much we need each other, and how much ability we actually have to support and encourage each other. We are not plants, after all, or inanimate objects, or shells that were once inhabited: we're highly intelligent and adaptable social animals whose primary purposes are to learn, to share, and to care for each other and this strange place we call home.
The terrarium is a deceptively tricky environment to manage, as is our world. In the mid-70s, I worked in a plant store, and terrariums were the trendy thing to buy. Customers often wanted to cram the terrarium too full of specimens; to the owner's credit she advised against that, but people wanted them to look lush from day one. Then plants would fail and they'd be back for more; they cycle kept repeating till they became frustrated and threw them out.
I think of your metaphor and extend it to that behaviour, and the obvious parallel: do we have a sense of 'enough', and are we habituated to having more than we can take care of?
Posted by: Duchesse | January 19, 2021 at 07:52 AM
You have a fascinating desk. But do you think you will eventually move on to cultivating bonsai?
Posted by: Peter | January 19, 2021 at 06:26 PM
Oh, I like your little world. You make it, and it grows as it can and changes. And then you take watercolor--so mutable itself--and make it unchangeable and set a little guard on it.
Good cheer despite all!
Posted by: Marly Youmans | February 01, 2021 at 09:19 PM