An Ecotherapy Handbook
Preface
I tell people that the earth saved me at midlife in a similar way that dance and music saved me as a newborn. We are reborn at midlife in certain ways, we begin again as it were to make sense or meaning of our lives all over again, hoping to do a better job of it the second time around.
Everyone who looks to the creation for hope and salvation has a story to tell. Chapters of my story opened with cataclysmic natural disasters that most climatologists attribute to global warming brought on by human pollution.
My garden life began in earnest in central Alabama in a small mining town just north of Birmingham, an infamous source of industrial pollution. I arrived from Columbus, Mississippi to interview for a job teaching ancient languages at the Alabama School of Fine Arts just days immediately following the infamous Oak Grove-Birmingham Tornado of April 8. Like so many people who had grown up in torando alley of the Deep South, I just didn't pay it much mind that I was about to move to a city associated with not just one devastating tornado but any number of them.
Grief would be my lot with that move even though the job logically should have been the perfect fit for me and a school that housed rigorous academics and artistic practice under the same roof. Endless turf wars and interpersonal conflict took the place of productive collaborations across disciplines, partnerships that could have made the Alabama School of Fine Arts a destination of choice for gifted students from all over the country.
I poured my grief and disappointment into the garden out front, wondering why God had punished my longing for community and collaboration with the petty arguments at work.
13 years later another catastrophic tornado, April of 2011, utterly terrified me and my household, made my house uninhabitable while leaving a plastic tray of transplants delicately balanced on the edge of a raised bed, precisely where I had placed it the day before the tornado.
A delicate balance is, in fact, what I had learned more about during the intervening years between the two Aprils of 1998 and 2011.
Here are the plants I had just bought exactly where I had placed them in and on the raised bed before the tornado, but the landscaping fabric to the right of the raised bed was lying flat with mulch on top. The landscaping fabric got rolled up and the bare dirt beneath exposed while the plants were left untouched. In the background of the photograph is visible the huge rootball of the enormous red oak on the corner; if it had fallen on the house rather than wind driving it to lie down directly alongside the house, would I or any of my household in the house be alive today? Also in the background lies the metal ductwork from another structure in the neighborhood.
Before the 2011 tornado, behind my house stood an acre of woodland. The huge winds laid down all the trees in back in a counter clockwise circle. And yet, the morning after the tornado, one of the squirrels miraculously survived and in shock blinks at me from one of his downed trees. Two trees were left standing, a yellow poplar with no branches on the edge of my property and half a magnolia across the street. In the days following the tornado, the squirrels scurried back and forth between the 2 trees left standing. Eventually they got run over.
A terrifying silence fills a scene where a catastrophic tornado has razed a formerly burgeoning spring landscape. There is no birdsong.
Here is the house 2 doors down from me in the direction from which the tornado arrived. 3 dogs had been left tied up in the backyard; the owner did not include their fates in her disaster planning.