Author: wapatangawilds

ONE BIOTA

“The black prairie was built by the prairie plants, a hundred distinctive species of grasses, herbs, and shrubs, by the prairie fungi, insects, and bacteria; by the prairie mammals and birds, all interlocked in one humming community of co-operations and competitions, one biota. This biota through ten thousand years of living and dying, burning and growing, preying and fleeing, freezing and thawing, built that dark and bloody ground we call prairie.”   Aldo Leopold , Round River

Yes, Leopold got it right. There is only one biota. He coined this phrase in reference to the formation of what we call prairie. But I think we can extrapolate the phrase to global significance. Think about it. All life is connected. All life is dependent on things like carbon, water, sunlight, nutrients, rocks, soil, temperature, oxygen , etc. One life form performs functions in the ecosystem needed by other living organisms in the system. I have learned from my Indian friends that everything, even the rocks, are alive, for the rocks are made up of atoms which are always in motion. Consider the simple connections like plants capturing the energy of sunlight in photosynthesis and then making that energy available to animals and humans for life support, while at the same time these same plants are releasing the oxygen needed by these same animals and humans. And the animals in turn release the carbon dioxide needed by the plants. That is a very intimate life connection – so do you see what I mean when I say there is really only one biota?  What about the bacteria and fungi in the soil that decompose complicated molecular compounds and release nutrients to plants for life support or those very important bacteria that cooperate with leguminous plant roots to take the very important nutrient we call nitrogen right out of the air we all breathe? Very few organisms on earth could survive very long at all if the sun did not appear each day to supply the energy we all need – all of us, one biota, depend on the sun- except for some microbes that can metabolize certain molecular compounds and do not need the sun, but they still need the air and the elements released into that air by plants and animals and yes, rocks. They need the elements in the rocks, as we all do, to sustain life, yes rocks are needed to sustain life as we know it. Again it is all one biota.

So I beg you please leave the box you live in and get outside onto a prairie or into a woodland or into a mountain meadow or a wetland or onto the ocean and look around and feel the life there – observe the plants, see the insects and birds, imagine the bacteria and fungi, look for signs of animals, breathe in deeply the air, absorb the warmth of the sun on your skin – melt a little inside your heart – and then listen, be very very quiet, stop thinking… set aside any thoughts about decisions needing to be made or work needing to get done… and listen, listen, listen…as you listen continue to observe all the detail around you… see the life… feel the life pulsing in the organisms around you…don’t be afraid to touch it, even lay down in it and talk to it… and then maybe you will begin to experience the meaning of Leopold’s phrase…” one biota”.

And then hopefully you will more likely concern yourself with the practices of conservation and preservation. Not only to protect the natural beauty of the life around you, but to be a person of ultimate integrity, a person who values the preservation of your fellow beings in this thing I refer to as one biota over economic gain or personal ego. So often humans have been driven by these latter two selfish motivations and such pursuits have led not only to environmental degradation of unimaginable proportions, such as the extinction of not only species but entire ecosystems, but also to destructive wars and genocides around the planet, and of course extreme poverty and its associated diseases and hunger.

And then too maybe all people of all races and cultures can begin to see that even among humans there is only one biota. We all on this planet are all engaged in this thing called life as one biota, we are all connected, our commonalities are by far stronger than our differences… and if we truly desire to be humans of dignity and integrity we will join together with people of all the world to build lives of value and worth and freedom and quality and peace and joy.

I hope it will be helpful to this process to remind ourselves constantly that on this planet there is only ONE BIOTA.

Thoughts of Glenn Thomas Fell, Emporia, Kansas

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I sit by a backyard campfire.  I look around me.  In front of me is a pile of sunflower stalks I cut from the prairie garden and piled there to be slowly burned over the winter. Just last month these stalks were full of life, yellow blooms with nectar feeding bees and butterflies. Yet now they lie dead and brown having completed their role for the season. The birds and squirrels have already eaten much of the seed they produced but some seed now lies on the ground waiting to germinate in the Spring and continue the cycle of life.  I am prompted to reflect on my own life up to now, what role I have played, the choices made, to look back at my own path of life.

I made a stop in a wooded wild this morning and contemplated among Fall’s dying leaves. I came to this: This place is intimately, intricately, intertwined with life and death. As am I. How glad I am I made this stop.

Sunday afternoon I sat in the backyard listing in my mind the wild plants in our yard (some that were here and many I have seeded) of which the seed or fruit is used by birds for food. I was pleasantly surprised by the inventory: Lambsquarter, Giant Ragweed, Prairie Coneflower, Gray-headed Coneflower, Boneset, Goldenrod, Aster, Sunflower (6 species), Rosinweed,  Blue Sage, Compassplant, Black-eyed Susan, Pokeweed, Poison Ivy, Red Cedar, Mulberry, Hackberry, Nightshade, Partridge Pea, Wild Strawberry, Chickweed, Pigweed, Dayflower, Dandelion, Pokeweed, Purple Coneflower, Milkweed, Wild Ryegrass, Indiangrass, Big and Little Bluestem, Switchgrass, Purpletop and Sidoats. First line in the forward to Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac comes to mind: “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”  I cannot.

Fall deepens. Turn back the clocks tonight. The temperature this morning was 27. One week ago it was a record high of 88, today it will only get to 48. I am sitting by a backyard campfire. The tomato plants near me, which were fresh and green yesterday, are dead, the leaves drooping toward the ground. The ski poles which have served as tomato stakes all summer can now be removed with hopes of using them for what they were made for next month. All summer I have looked forward to a Fall day that would allow me to sit here by a fire, even at mid-day. It is noon right now. I feel the bright sun on my back, yet the air is cool. It is about 40. It is a pleasantry to sit by the fire and write. Sitting by a fire is an ancient and still common human activity, well, common in low income communities. And low income communities are still common. Yet, I suppose my kind of fire sitting is of a wealthy sort. I have the luxury of burning wood without using it to cook or heat. It is an entertainment for me. I have a ready supply of wood to burn from broken branches in my yard, without having to walk far distances to acquire it. I sit by the fire for leisurely pleasure, not for productive necessity as would be the case, for example, in a rural African village. For me, it is a luxury, there it is a need. I like to tell myself it is healthy for me mentally, emotionally, spiritually to sit here. But that is me trying to find a productive reason to do it. Really, I sit here just because I like to. So I am glad I get to. It is something I do not have to do, it is something I get to do. It is like being alive. I do not have to be alive, but I am glad I get to be. I am lucky I get to live in a place where I get to sit by a fire in my backyard.

One thing I do not want to do here by the fire is think. That is my aim whenever I am in a wild, to not think. By that I mean dwell on matters involving making decisions or problems to solve. I try to just observe and listen. Reflection is okay and unavoidable really. That is where the writing comes from. Not thinking is a discipline to be learned. One learns to shut off thinking upon entering a wild. It takes practice, but with practice, before long, it becomes automatic and welcome. It is in those times, I am most aware and in touch with the feeling of being alive. Perhaps, that is why I like it, that is why I do it, why it never gets old, is never boring, because it is always so full of the life in me and in all the wild around me.

Walked in the woods today. Saw a surprise butterfly, even after 27 degrees night before last. I saw fruits of a Wahoo tree and Ground Cherry, stood under a very big Cottonwood tree, listened to the crunch of colorful dead leaves under my feet as I walked, and got to sit and write on the bench that made itself by falling out of a tree and landing alongside the path. These words came:

Timeless Calling.

I sit in a wild
life all around me and sound.

I tumble into a timeless calling
like a leaf falling
end over end
past where my time would bend
like the tree that bends over the path,
as I fall into a kind of timeless math.

This wild it seems is a place void of the pace
that dictates my every day,
in here, in this wild,
it has somehow slipped away
and I continue falling into a timeless calling
feeling that what is here, in this wild,
in the leaf, in the ground, in the air, in the birds, in the tree,
is more than I can see, is more than me,
yet, is within me.

Life is best lived if not productive all the time. Time is well spent just sitting by a small fire on a Friday Fall morning. The air is cool, the fire warm, the sunlight on the yellow fallen leaves is soft. Time is of lesser importance than when busy being productive. In those productive times, time itself becomes a measure of productivity. Not so sitting by the fire. Watching the small stems and branches burn is like watching time burn in a way. It took time, quite a lot of time for those plants to absorb the energy of the sun and grow into stems and branches. And now as they burn it is like that time is being released rather quickly. And so I just sit, not being productive, yet feeling life. Taking time, planning for time, to just sit is needed to really live life. I cannot think of a better place to do that than in nature. It doesn’t have to be a long time, even a half hour or an hour will do, if that is all the time, time will allow.

Creek Stones                        

Lying on creek stones

On my weak bones

In a nature’s wild

Feeling an inner smile like a happy child

A gust of south wind blows and I feel light as a feather

Free for now of any worldly tether

Stepping out of the human pace

Burning sage smoke blows in my face

Eye level with water flowing in a crystal stream

It’s so much more than just a dream

Like the sky so blue my heart feels true

In nature I go out to observe and listen.