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THOUGHTS ON LETTING GOD GROW CREEN UNMOLESTED



The Spanish poet Lorca, assassinated by Franco: "They cut timber and lioness teats as easily as if they were baking bread."

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Sterling North: We are but the ephemera of the moment,the brief custodians of redwoods which were ancient when Christ was

born.

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Utah resident Robert Redford said Ohioans are really into lawnmowers. This is still true of a majority of landowners,

but Ohioans have won federal and local court victories

against compulsory lawnmowing.

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Alice Herrington, deceased president

of Friends of Animals: re her unmowed

acreage: 'the bunnies like it'.

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Femka R: Our Serbian trees were

burned in bombing by the US regime.

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Ted Steinberg, Cleveland environmental historian and author of American Green: (re the American obsession with a crewcut layer

of monotypic chipped blue grass) Long Island or Lawn Guyland as it is sometimes called.



(While scythes too can kill toads and butterflies and sapling trees, they don't kill as many as machine

harvesters)

The Scythe Book: Mowing Hay, Cutting Weeds, and Harvesting Small Grains, With Hand Tools (Paperback)

by David Tresemer



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Mike Dixon, mayor of Blackey Kentucky, who stopped mowing his lawn:

"I don't want to fight nature anymore. Flowers began popping up in my yard. Birds and squirrels also moved in. I don't know why we cut grass, but I do know that I like to sit here in the evenings and enjoy what we have in eastern Kentucky.

I don't like to hear the buzzing sound of lawn mowers and weed cutters."

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Edward G Bulwer-Lytton:

"Love thou the rose, yet leave it on its stem."

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Stephen King in The Lawn Mower Man:

"The neighbor's dog chased the cat under the mower...

they cleaned off the blades. Harold decied to get rid of the mower."



"the mower spat out the mole..

in a series of entrails"



"The lawnmower was tearing through the unfortunate grass like an

avenging devil from hell."

*



Walt Whitman:

We are the journeywork of the stars, no less than the leaves of grass."

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Seth Godin:

The reason for a lawn? To demonstrate wastefulness. A lawn tells your neighbors you can afford to waste land, waste water and have a team of servants to keep it all pretty.. 17 billion

a year business

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Frank Hyman:

1

"Aside from the costs, some folks have more of an aesthetic opposition to lawns. They consider them boring."

2

"I come here not to bury the American lawn, but to shrink it."



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Cyberspace Anon:

Now let me get this straight. They fertilize grass so it will grow. And when it does grow, they cut it off and pay to throw it away?

*



Speak to me of Love, said St Francis to the almond tree,

and the almond tree blossomed.

-Nikos Kazantzakis-

*

Catullus:

"As a flower springs up secretly in a fenced garden,

unknown to the cattle, torn up by no plough,



Vt flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis,

ignotus pecori, nullo conuolsus aratro,

http://www.vroma.org/~hwalker/VRomaCatullus/062.html





Edna St Vincent Millay:

God, I can push the grass apart and lay my finger on Thy heart.



Pablo Neruda:

You can cut all the flowers but you can't keep the spring from coming.



Haiku poet Nancy Wiley:

My canoe skirts them

Aunt Deede's water lilies

. . . she watches



Author Peggy Mason:

What can one think of a child of seven, who weeps at the sight of trees being cut down because God is being hurt? I felt that God must be in the tiniest flower, the smallest insect, in the stones under one's feet, as well as in the vastness of the starry heavens.

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S Shriver: responding to "Wild violet is a persistent

lawn weed" .. the reply: "We have scotched these purple

fragilities with such unconscious facility."

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Isaiah: Break not the bruised reed.

*

And as at dawn across the level mead

On wings impetuous some wind will come,

And with its too harsh kisses break the reed

Which was its only instrument of song, -Oscar Wilde-

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Revelation's Fifth Angel: Harm no green living being

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Buddha: May all that have life be delivered from suffering.

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Bhagavad Gita: Of trees I am the fig.

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Mahavira of the Jains: Kill not. Cause no pain.

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Jesus: Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not nor do they

spin. Yet Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed as one of these.

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Joel 1: The land mourns the destruction of plants.

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Jeremiah 10: 3 For the customs of the people are vanity. For one

cuts a tree out of the forest. They deck it with silver and gold.

They fasten it with nails that it not move.

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Sai Baba: Why pluck a flower and hasten her death?

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Genesis 1:29 Behold I have given you herb yielding seed. To

you it shall be for food.

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George Bernard Shaw: I love little children too but I don't

cut off their heads and stick them in vases.

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Oscar Wilde:

The fact is I picked a primrose in the wood yesterday

and she became so ill, I sat up with her all night.



*

Isaiah: Turn your weapons into plowshares (no till advocates

say plowshares too like mowers are violent.)

*

Washington Post editorial March 19, 1977:

"The tall grass can only benefit the citizens who seek the beauty of Rock Creek Park".

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Robert Frost has several poems

on not mowing:



THE TUFT OF FLOWERS



I went to turn the grass once after one

Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen

Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,

And I must be, as he had been -- alone,

'As all must be,' I said within my heart,

'Whether they work together or apart.'

But as I said it, swift there passed me by

On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night

Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,

As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,

And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,

And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look

At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared

Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,

Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,

And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own,

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,

And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech

With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

'Men work together,' I told him from the heart,

'Whether they work together or apart.'



(The Tuft Of Flowers was included in a 1929

collection of the world's most famous poems)



WEST-RUNNING BROOK

'Fred, where is north?'

'North? North is there, my love.

The brook runs west.'

'West-running Brook then call it.'

(West-Running Brook men call it to this day.)

'What does it think k's doing running west

When all the other country brooks flow east

To reach the ocean? It must be the brook

Can trust itself to go by contraries

The way I can with you -- and you with me --

Because we're -- we're -- I don't know what we are.

What are we?'

'Young or new?'

'We must be something.

We've said we two. Let's change that to we three.

As you and I are married to each other,

We'll both be married to the brook. We'll build

Our bridge across it, and the bridge shall be

Our arm thrown over it asleep beside it.

Look, look, it's waving to us with a wave

To let us know it hears me.'

' 'Why, my dear,

That wave's been standing off this jut of shore --'

(The black stream, catching a sunken rock,

Flung backward on itself in one white wave,

And the white water rode the black forever,

Not gaining but not losing, like a bird

White feathers from the struggle of whose breast

Flecked the dark stream and flecked the darker pool

Below the point, and were at last driven wrinkled

In a white scarf against the far shore alders.)

'That wave's been standing off this jut of shore

Ever since rivers, I was going to say,'

Were made in heaven. It wasn't waved to us.'

'It wasn't, yet it was. If not to you

It was to me -- in an annunciation.'

'Oh, if you take it off to lady-land,

As't were the country of the Amazons

We men must see you to the confines of

And leave you there, ourselves forbid to enter,-

It is your brook! I have no more to say.'

'Yes, you have, too. Go on. You thought of something.'

'Speaking of contraries, see how the brook

In that white wave runs counter to itself.

It is from that in water we were from

Long, long before we were from any creature.

Here we, in our impatience of the steps,

Get back to the beginning of beginnings,

The stream of everything that runs away.

Some say existence like a Pirouot

And Pirouette, forever in one place,

Stands still and dances, but it runs away,

It seriously, sadly, runs away

To fill the abyss' void with emptiness.

It flows beside us in this water brook,

But it flows over us. It flows between us

To separate us for a panic moment.

It flows between us, over us, and with us.

And it is time, strength, tone, light, life and love-

And even substance lapsing unsubstantial;

The universal cataract of death

That spends to nothingness -- and unresisted,

Save by some strange resistance in itself,

Not just a swerving, but a throwing back,

As if regret were in it and were sacred.

It has this throwing backward on itself

So that the fall of most of it is always

Raising a little, sending up a little.

Our life runs down in sending up the clock.

The brook runs down in sending up our life.

The sun runs down in sending up the brook.

And there is something sending up the sun.

It is this backward motion toward the source,

Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,

The tribute of the current to the source.

It is from this in nature we are from.

It is most us.'

'To-day will be the day....You said so.'

'No, to-day will be the day

You said the brook was called West-running Brook.'

'To-day will be the day of what we both said.')