COMMENTARY: Trees and truths: They come from the same roots

I tend a garden to tend my mind. Alone long enough with a pack of seeds and a patch of soil and a woman can get a good thing going — a friendship circle of sunflowers, a reunion with last year’s compulsive propagators and baskets of nourishment. I make a contract with a patch of ground every year because the soil is where my happiness is born.

Gardeners, by definition, are hopeful people. It’s that way for me and the seeds I care for even in dormancy. I call them my Hopium Collection. Seeds are all the potential for beauty: the graceful arch of a stem that has yet to grow, the shape of a leaf, the color of the flower, the abundance of fruit. They are everything that is possible and hold all the faith I can muster.

Diversity is present in seeds, just like in people. There are seeds that need fire, seeds that need freezing, seeds that need to be swallowed and etched with digestive acids and expelled as “waste,” and seeds that need to be smashed open before they germinate. Metaphorically rich stuff.

Growing things is my act of resistance against the eroding world, the entropy of natural decomposition, the maw at my center of gravity. If I didn’t have my little garden, I’d adopt a piece of nowhere — a path through a forest, a section of barrow pit, a mud puddle at the edge of a quarry — any place will do. It will be mine to defend with all the preservation instincts I know, it’s very existence enough to inspire me.

As the leaves of trees fall and return to soil like everything else, I think of the progress of undoing. “Deconstruction” is a trendy term and click-driver on social media these days describing the process of critically examining a religious belief system. I prefer the term “transformation,” for that is the natural work of this world and what we do as humans, but I don’t use social media enough to defend myself. Still, words matter to me.

The words “tree” and “truth” share the same Indo-European root — “deru-” — meaning firm and steadfast, which produced the Old English “treowe” that we now know as “true.” The words “trust” and “truce” branch from this root as well, but I hardly think trees care for etymological dictionaries. Trees are too busy doing the magic of alchemy, turning mineral to carbon before returning to the soil where the tree is unmade.

Soil is a word used to mean both good and evil. Soil is land, place and ground on earth where plants grow; it also means to defile or pollute with sin. The word sin is often, maybe always, misunderstood. Etymologically speaking, “sin” is an ancient Greek archery term meaning “missed the mark.”

For me, there is no supernatural punishment prescribed to my missed marks, no supernatural judge to warrant a speck of existential dread. As a Secular Humanist, I measure my ethical development and the morality of my marks by whether they contribute to the well-being of humans over the care and feeding of a supernatural judge. When the word “sin” is de-natured and super-naturalized, it produces unnecessary mental and emotional distress. People who are taught to believe that others are supernaturally sinful or unholy tend to dehumanize them, especially LBGTQ+ folks, women, BIPOC, poor, weak, ill, etc. Dehumanizing others allows for two things: extremism and atrocity. Atrocities, by definition, are never a moral mark.

For me, this is what sticks: a less superstitious world, one without religious-excused bigotry and apocalyptic thinking, one with greater tethering to this world and each other would be more just, compassionate, and more humane.

Winter is long for ruminating over weedy things. I like the idea that people are good or simply neutral by nature and sometimes miss their marks. We can always practice our aim, our technique or actions, and our delivery. Humans have been adapting to our environment and adjusting ourselves and our societies for a long time or we wouldn’t be here. The fittest to survive is always those able to adapt, those who successfully transform with the rest of nature. It’s what humans do because we must. Naturally.

I’ll spend the winter practicing my aim. There is always work to do fighting natural decay and destruction to keep a body and mind maintained, to keep the world a place where humans thrive. When seed catalogs arrive to draw my drool and stoke my cabin-fevered throes of winter, I’ll renew my contract with the place I live and from the fine print, adjacent places where people live.

#BeTheSeed #BeTheSoil #Grow.

Marugg is a Secular Humanist supportive of healthy communities for both religious and nonreligious people. She can be reached at janetmarugg7@gmail.com.