Meditation on a Brush Pile
The brush pile is where we collect all the plant matter we have policed: tree limbs that have fallen onto the lawn, litter raked from the corners of the yard, diseased leaves and shoots clipped from the vegetable plants in the raised beds, and the wilting mounds of innumerable plants we have designated as weeds and uprooted. Brush piles such as this are a human notion. Nature herself has neither weeds nor waste.
First let us acknowledge the shortcomings of the common usage of the English word nature I have slipped into here. The English language lacks the word I really want to be using. Recently the website Poetry Daily published an excerpt from an essay written in Spanish by Irma Pineda. Pineda is an Isthmus Zapotec poet and writer; the excerpt from her essay was translated into English by Sally Keith, an Editorial Co-Director at Poetry Daily. This passage from that excerpt speaks directly to my point:
“In my mother-tongue, Didxazá (Zapotec), there are two words for referring to nature. One word is nagá, which makes reference to greenery, that which grows and reproduces, like plants, trees, flowers, maize: because there will be food, there will also be life. The other word, which we use more frequently, is guendanabani, which you translate as the blessing of life and which makes reference as much to the human life as to everything that surrounds us. According to binnizá (Zapotec people) understanding, there is no separation between people and nature: we are one entity.”
In English, by contrast, when we speak of “nature” we typically mean to indicate all that humans did not have a role in creating. At some level we know that this “nature” includes humans but in practice we have a strong tendency to associate ourselves with our built environments, as if somehow we were clever enough to be beyond nature. It’s a dangerous obfuscation.
Can I temporarily borrow the word I need from the Zapotec? A weed is a plant growing where a human does not want it. In nature—by which here I mean nagá— plants are adapted to certain conditions and do better or worse, or not at all, according to the environment and the plant’s adaptations. Some plants are spectacularly well-suited to the conditions where they are growing but if a human does not want that plant there, it becomes a weed and is relocated, typically to the brush pile. Were it growing elsewhere it could well have been designated as a wildflower or a medicinal plant.
Like weeds, spoil is a human notion. Nature is all about bounty. In nagá there is no waste. Peach blossom attracts pollinator then falls to what we think of as ruin but for nagá, its chief purpose fulfilled, the petal now adds its richness to the soil. Yes, the zucchini plant may be dying but look how the squash bugs are flourishing, a cloud of gray juveniles hatching out of the specks of amber eggs, drinking in the zucchini leaves, the vines, the fruit, growing into the adult who will overwinter and begin again next summer. A feral apple wizens and falls, or falls in full blush, bruising on the ground, windfall waste, but not to nagá. Browsed by deer the apple’s flesh feeds, and the seeds are carried afar, dropped to the ground wrapped in fertilizer. Spoil, waste, is what we say when we didn’t get to use it.
This “sleight-of-mind” whereby we say nature and misleadingly use the word to mean all that is, which we have not artificed—misleading because of our dangerous tendency to forget to include ourselves within the confines of that definition, is an omission with the pernicious effect of causing us to neglect our utter dependence on nature, on guendanabani, the blessing of life. It’s an aspect, I suspect, of our deep, unspoken desire to believe that we individually will somehow outwit that surest of characteristics in nature—mortality.
Our dangerous obfuscation—our stubborn refusal as a group—as a community, as a species—to see how inextricably we are webbed into nature—ironically is not only not providing an escape hatch from death but is paradoxically hastening mortality on a huge scale, hastening not just the deaths of individuals but of species including our own. The mortality we are unwittingly inventing is not the species-renewing mortality of nature, but the dead end of human unintended consequences. Spoil exists but it’s our production, the meddling, the disruption we introduce on a grand scale working from our partial knowledge, working from our ignorance. Working ourselves out of a workable planet.
Language does not equal the world but language mediates our approach to the world, our interaction with the blessing of life. Another wheelbarrow load on the brush pile. Weed, waste, nature. The dangers are imminent. It matters how deeply our recognition roots.
Three of Christine Gelineau’s essays have been cited as Notable Essays in Best American Essays. Read more.