My garden has been a desolation for months – drying under the blistering heat. This past week, there have been a few signs of life returning. There is a faint blush of green. I can step outside without feeling grief.

Today is the start of Autumn, and September 1st marks the beginning of the Season of Creation for some churches and groups. There is much here on the blog that you might like to follow if you’re interested, under the tags Green, Creation, Everybody Now. You might like to start with Gaia.

Over the past week, I’ve been thinking about hope. I’ve been thinking about how, now this summer has brought the reality of climate change home to so many of us, there is a feeling of despair – people saying it’s too late, there’s no hope. While there is much that has been lost, there is so much truth in the old adage, where there’s life, there’s hope.

There is deep wisdom in the natural world, and I’ve been wondering what biomimicry can teach us about hope. And so I have been paying attention. I see, everywhere, life seizing every sliver of opportunity to live, to grown, to flourish. Even while Dunwich Heath still holds massive heat in its soils, those who work there are noticing signs of life returning, and birds beginning to fly. Life does not hope, it lives, often recklessly and in what we think of as inappropriate places. So I’m thinking I might try to Be More Weed, to rest when I need to and to keep flowering whenever the rain falls.

I’ve tried to express some of this plant hope – learning the hope of plants, in this poem. I think it’s appropriate for the day. I think it may also chime with other times when we feel that hope has dried up. If so, I hope it offers a drop of rain on dry ground.

It’s not hope, exactly

Last night, rain fell.
The sky was luminous,
flashing with white lightning,
and the thunder rolled into my dreams

With the smell of earth softening.
Life knows what to do with a gift

morning sees green begin
to swirl through the lawn,
rejoicing the hawkbit
bowing under the weight
of glorious pantaloon bees.

This is not hope, exactly –
a tiny wildflower
pushing through the cracks,
the way ferns now rise again
as a small brook sings
over dead twigs,
how pigeons rebuild their nest

Not what we so often mean by hope –
it does not ask, is it worth it,
what if we fail,
what if the heat comes back?
Life does not hope
Life does not choose life

It uncoils greenly today
grows today, lives,
for today the rain falls.
If all this softness knows only to
begin again and again and again,
then why not you, why not me, why not us?
Is not this good green earth worth living for?

The lawn in greener days. The yellow flowers are from the hawkbit family, mentioned in the poem. Pantaloon bees love them, and only appear in the garden when the flowers are open.

Female pantaloon bee, showing her yellow, pollen-coated legs. From Freepic.com