Thoreau’s message in Walden gives me pause every time I spot a weed in my garden. My knee-jerk reaction is to pull the thing because I didn’t plant it and it’s a threat to what I did plant. How sinister the weed seems in a certain mood, mimicking the cultivated plant by taking on the shape of the leaves. You have to look very closely to detect the difference. It could be a subtle as a slight coating of fuzz on the stem or 3 petals instead of 4. Weeds are brilliant at counterfeit. I look around my garden and imagine how it would look weedless and what it would take to make it perfect. Someone else’s idea of perfection would require completely clearing it, cutting down the gnarly old lilacs and plum tree, getting rid of the topsoil to level the ground. They would create a blank canvas and design a new landscape. And then the systematic chemical war would be scheduled to prevent weeds from even trying to mar their sterile aesthetic.

 It takes a shift in perspective to allow different kinds of life to grow in our garden, not to obliterate the wild to preserve what we’re trying to cultivate. Thoreau hopes to wake us up to the intrinsic value of the wild by writing Walden. Creativity and inspiration sprout from that wild place. Without the wild, what is the dogged execution – the cultivation - of our gardens, our work, our lives – worth?

So, we humans have brought this beautiful blue/green planet to the brink of destruction. Some of us are responding to the crisis with mindful meditation. Some of us are organizing with an activist's call to protest in an attempt to shut down or change offending industries and their sources of income. Some of us are working to educate and some of us are working to uneducate. Some of us are trying to change the way we live and model sustainability. Some of us are working to force the hand of legislators to create new environmental policies. Some of us are responding with entrepreneurial endeavors for planet, profit, and nonprofit. Some of us are looking forward to it because it's God's plan or because Gaia's fed up with our disrespectful and ungrateful species. Some of us are indifferent to it because the universe is indifferent and stuff happens. Some of us don't believe it. Some of us are trying to hang on to damaging practices because they're our livelihood. And some of us want to engineer our way out of it.

Our responses to the ecological crisis reflect the values that fuel our beliefs that fuel our behavior. If we believe we can engineer the climate back to health, we feel that it is unethical not to. If we believe that God is speaking through climate change, we feel that it is unethical to interfere. If we believe that technology can save a puddle of the human gene pool by getting off the planet before it's too late, we feel that it is unethical not to move in that direction. Through the lens of our values, facts can be fiction and fictions can be fact. We can witness and even experience the same devastation, but will interpret it according to our beliefs. Facts won't change a mind that doesn't value the source generating them.

Biologically, we're in the same boat. But one's rowing, one's plotting a mutiny, one's revving the engine, one's refusing to budge, one's panicking, one's blogging, one's praying, one's bailing, one's designing a new boat, one's throwing a scapegoat overboard.... Our diversity would be our greatest gift if we valued it. The diversity of nature would be our greatest teacher if we valued it. We waste our energy and the planet's energy trying to make everyone else conform to our own values. Even ethics, once asking the most important question, 'how should I live?' has been reduced to 'how should I comply?'

This is a call to examine our place in the universe from our own and then from someone else's values, not for the sake of argument, but for the sake of perspective. The earth is telling us that we fueled the wrong fire while squelching the one fire that we need: empathy. It is the simplest thing, the thing that could change everything else systemically, the thing the earth needs from us, the thing from which respect, reverence for life, and innovative solutions that do more good than harm, stem. Why is the simplest thing the hardest thing? Are we free to choose to be empathic creatures acting for the sake of the other or are we bound by some unnatural instinct to destroy all that is beautiful and bountiful?

While evolution suggests many things such as purpose, adaptation, fulfillment, survival, process towards perfection or diversity as the hot debate goes, evolution itself seems both creative and destructive. The wild drama going on outside and inside our bodies shows us that illnesses evolve, criminal minds evolve under the right circumstances and conditions, flowers evolve to attract the right insects, species evolve to swim or fly or burrow or walk. Evidence of the great "procession of life," as Emerson puts it, is everywhere.

As I write, my cat and I are watching sparrows picking up bits of red material and flying off to build their nests. The forsythia have burst into bloom calling forth a few groggy bees looking like they wished they'd waited for the lilacs. The hundred year old plum tree appears dead but will blossom and outshine all the youngsters in time. The eyes through which I watch have evolved to witness nature's drama. The mind pondering has evolved to interpret it as home, as mine: my yard nagging to be tended, my garden itching to be planted, and as other, as not mine:  God's, Gaia's, nobody's microcosm of the biodiversity on the planet. Whatever the human spirit is, it seems to have evolved to be inspired, motivated, overwhelmed, awe-struck, empowered, or annoyed by the senses awakened by nature. The seasons seem to be circular because cyclical. But Emerson, in a prophetic Fibonacci mood, intuited a spiral, the ever expanding circles Thoreau witnessed when he tossed a pebble into Walden Pond.

The poet knows that seals are evolved gurus. The naturalist teaches the scientist the obvious: that apes evolved from humans, not the other way around. The ethicist understands that dogs are evolved in compassion. Everyone knows that comedians were once ducks. The artist wonders if the dragonfly's eye is the future of her own. The child sees yes. We are bones and genes, flesh and food for microorganisms, myth and neurons, romance, biochemistry and mystery, mortal and immortal as spring bulbs, beings made of comet stuff. We are made of everything it takes to imagine and understand that comets' lives would be meaningless if they revolved around chasing their own tails. 

Blame for American optimism often falls to essayist and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson. This "hitch your wagon to a star!" thinker inspired the Transcendental Movement and compelled his protege, Henry David Thoreau, to build a cabin in Walden woods and experiment with living deliberately. Emerson's high-flying quotes could serve as an affirmation a day for a lifetime. But using his words as mere affirmations or as proof that he led us down a superficial path to empty optimism misses the wisdom behind his words that we desperately need - wisdom born of loss and grief.

The Emerson pedigree places him among the Boston Brahmins. But his early lived experience was anything but. His father's death at a young age thrust his family into poverty and challenged his mother to keep them afloat by renting rooms to boarders. He bore the brunt of jokes at school because he and his brothers alternated wearing one winter coat among them. Loss after loss of loved ones, mostly due to consumption running rampant, would justify a cynical, bereft, and pessimistic voice. The optimism echoing in those happy, pithy quotes was hard won, and a conscious choice. I doubt that he would have introduced his thought experiment in his first book, Nature, launching Transcendentalism if he hadn't had a deep relationship with nature and spirit...and an optimism grounded in grief.

In light of the degradation of nature that is affecting all of life, beginning with the most vulnerable, what do we need to transcend in order to find and act on, not fluffy affirmations or hopeless cynicism, but grounded optimism?