Spring

The Merry Spring:

I remember that once I read a piece by a farmer, who was writing about environmentalists; he said that, in his experience, they failed entirely to understand nature with their focus on preservation. Farming was as close to living with the land as a man could get, and it was all about killing. The land will grow anything. If you want it to grow a particular thing, you spend a small time planting, and a long time killing. You kill the weeds that compete with your crop. You kill the animals that eat your crop. You kill insects, you kill molds and mildews, you kill, kill, kill.

So that's what I spent my day doing. Killing! Today I was mostly killing baby cedar trees, trying to reclaim some land for pasture that had been overtaken by the things. We have one giant cedar, but each cedar puts out millions of seeds; and of these, some hundreds are fruitful. There's a lesson in that mathematics for each of you, in whatever undertaking you care about.

Yet along comes me, and wipes out the few hundred that were fruitful. And perhaps there is a lesson there, as well: the Lord giveth, and some cowboy comes and takes it away.

(But be not too bold, for perhaps it is the other lesson: "And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.")

It was a good day.