to honor the Earth

 order within nature

order, pattern:

somebody here laid out the bricks

into and onto the ground next to the house,

that somebody had a plan that pleased their eye

with the forms the bricks made,

now moss seems to have painted itself

onto the lines between the bricks,

creatively overlapping and embellishing the order,

expressing it with the fullness of luxuriant deep green growth,

another order: we humans love our right angles,

I wonder if part of that order we feel in them

is from the plants' vertical thrust up toward the sun,

we then feel rightness in that assertion and echo it as best we can,

a Taoist meditation I use

admonishes us to honor the Earth with our dwellings,

to fit into the world as best we can,

and show our love for what is not implicitly us

with what is more explicitly us,

the garden that is geometric, controlled, unnatural,

appeals far less to me

than the garden whose order is 

from the flower itself, the leaf, the trunk,

the frame that sets off and celebrates the natural drive to order 

that suffuses the universe, complexity rising above entropy,

I resist the attraction of the whims of our power,

the one that shows us a view of ourselves 

but one that shrinks us, and distorts us,

I prefer the garden

to show us what is beyond us

and lets us enlarge the idea of who we are

and what we should honor,

I still honor what an architect, a worker,

and the moss, gratuitously, somehow

express in the pattern before me.

by Henry H. Walker

March  9, ‘25