Though it was chilly, I pulled on a wool coat this morning and set out for a constitutional around our little Victorian gem here in Fitchburg, the looking-glass pond at Coggshall Park. As I left the flat walking path beside the water and followed the trail up into the steep hills, I took note of the buds starting to leaf out:
yellow festoons on the branch-tips of the maples;
red nodules on the birches like tiny lanterns;
the needle-sprays of the pines aglow with a fringe of cheery, green new growth.
This is how spring begins around here, not with fanfare, but with the smallest uptick in light and hue. The season stirs in quiet increments. It’s the sort of change that comes when the familiar, established natural world around us begins to awaken to its annual renewal.
With current events on my mind even during the calm of my early-morning hike, this line of springtime thought quickly found a way to connect to the question of political change. Isn’t it so that we prefer new shoots, and not slogans of uprooting and upheaval? Don’t we want buds of fresh growth, rather than change forced by gunpoint? I hope this is the kind of flourishing we can all hope for.
There’s a story I once read. It goes: In the Caucasus Mountains, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a man planted a pear tree. Let’s call him Petya. No committee told him to plant this tree. No state agency paid him to. He certainly didn’t livestream it! He just had time on his hands. He walked three days to find an orchard that would sell him a sapling and then walked three days back to get home.
Once he planted the pear, he sang to it. It eventually grew tall and wide, and its branches were heavy with fruit every year for many years. He never sold the pears. He told others to pick the fruit whenever they were hungry and declined their lari with a smile. What’s the moral? The delicious twist? None. Maybe it’s a folktale precisely because it doesn’t resolve into a lesson.
Compare this story to the tale of Alexei Stakhanov—the Soviet miner who famously shoveled one hundred and two tons of coal in under six hours. Stakhanov became a symbol of superhuman labor (though not without a little help from Party propagandists) and his feat set a new standard which good Socialists were supposed to strive for: Give it your all, for the glory of the collective project. Become the most perfect, least-complaining, most functional cog in the vast machinery of the state you can! Exceed your production targets, comrades and droogs, and you will have fulfilled your purpose.
Well, Petya didn’t fill a train-car with coal. He didn’t defeat a dragon or turn back armies. He just planted a tree. His story invites us not to marvel at his superhuman industriousness or courage or daring, but to follow his quiet example. To become, in our own quiet way, Stakhanovs of mere kindness—champions not of production, but of provision.
We have figures like that in the folklore of our own backyard. Let me remind you of Apple Seed John, born John Chapman right here in North Central Massachusetts. Yes, the historical Johnny may have had commercial or missionary goals which motivated his orchard-planting. But the image we cherish is of a wanderer with a sack of seeds, a barefoot sower of futures, our American counterpart to the Petya with the pear tree. Abolitionist Lydia Maria Child has a great poem about him, which reads in part:
In cities, some said the old man was crazy
While others said he was only lazy;
But he took no notice of gibes and jeers,
He knew he was working for future years...
I think there’s a reason Child foregrounds that ethic of working for the future, and it’s the same reason we hold on to the mythic image of Johnny Appleseed walking westward, planting into the unknown…
We are living in the age of the machine mindset. Post-industrialization, even post-market-capitalism, we now live as individual devices hooked up directly to a grid of extraction and acceleration. You know how it feels to have your attention, your very breath, yoked to your calendar, your inbox, your feed.
The vast network of the modern machine measures your life in clicks, compliance, performance reviews. Pardon me if I sound too romantic, but it’s such an important thing to note that the machine cannot love, cannot mourn, cannot take part in the human pleasures of mystery, and ritual, and mutuality, in the pleasure of slowness or of good work done quietly for the benefit of people who may not even be born yet.
Had you read the news—though it barely made the news—that DOGE canceled funding for the Urban Canopy Project? This was an amazing federally funded initiative to plant shade trees in urban heat islands, redlined neighborhoods, sun-scorched schoolyards.
This program wasn’t just about trees. It was about the children who would otherwise have to wait for the bus in full sun, and about community elders whose porches are made inhospitable in the absence of shade. A tree is a mercy. The machine does not understand mercy. It only understands throughput. The machine counts the value of our days in the clicks we click and the coal we shovel, not in the hours we spend beneath the shade of a tree planted by someone kind.
Thinking of all this, I want to write today about ways we can act with counter-purpose against the machine. I can think of two ways to respond. The first is about making our style of living one that opposes machine-mindedness, one that prefers a thousand quiet refusals to one big gesture. To wit:
We can plant.
We can pause.
We can make things that don't scale.
We can write long emails no one asked for.
We can fix things instead of replacing them.
We can walk the same trail again and again, and bring a friend to join us.
We can learn the name of a tree in the neighborhood, and share it with others.
We can grow beans in a coffee can, and transplant the sprouts to the yard.
We can read poems out loud to no one in particular or to anyone in earshot.
When we find a mushroom, we can bring a friend to the spot to admire the small miracle together.
We can, in other words, construct our daily praxis out of small, odd, slow things that are full of care and full of meaning. These actions are the calisthenics of kindness. We do them not to be efficient, but to be human. That said, even in a small city like ours—on the lip of hill and mill, halfway between forest and freeway—it can sometimes feel like the moment calls for a bigger gesture. A more well-defined act of defiance against the machine. To that point, let me propose Three Local Actions that serve the meadow.
PLANT A TREE TOGETHER. Reach out to partner with a school, scout troop, a community or a church group, a gardening club or the Rotary, or even the public library. When you make contact, start a conversation about planting one or more shade trees or fruit trees where people gather. Choose heat-struck sidewalks, schoolyards, or forgotten corners. Plant for the people who will sit in that shade one day.
RECLAIM A FORGOTTEN TRAIL. Find a neglected path—a cemetery loop, a stream corridor, a patch of woods behind the shopping plaza. Walk it. Tend it. Map it by memory. Invite someone to join you. Find a “Keep (Your Town) Beautiful” group and join their mailing list. When a clean-up day hits the schedule, make it a point to show up, pull on gloves, and work alongside your neighbors to stand against litter and neglect. Contact the town or city Trails Committee, Greenspaces Commission, or Cemeteries Board, and stay in the loop with people who are similarly devoted to caring for our shared places.
HOLD A SEASONAL SKILL SWAP. Host a community gathering where neighbors can share traditional skills: mending, seed-saving, knife sharpening, fermentation, composting. In New England, that might include early spring foraging; herb and flower pressing; and honeybee hive prep. You don’t have to know how to do these things; you just have to be willing to seek out and meet people who do. The point is to let knowledge pass hand to hand, no registration fee required.
I was tempted use to the name “caring bee” instead of “skill swap.” A swap is a transaction, tit-for-tat, a barter. A bee is a different thing, where people share work and benefits instead of exchanging them. Whatever terminology you want to use, just make sure you’re advertising your event in enough ways, and in enough places, and in enough languages, to ensure you can connect with the kinds of people who would plant a pear tree for the benefit of whoever comes after them. The kinds of human ‘beans’ who plant pears knowing that those who eat the fruit will thank the tree, not the planters. (Just make sure no one is trying to plant Bradford pears!)
The machine cannot abide what it cannot measure. If you want to work against the machine, you just have to be willing to take every opportunity to clog its tubes and gears and screens with your human un-quan-ti-fi-ability, with your selflessness, your care, your slowness and devotion. Such tools are among the most cunning and effective in our sabotage tool kit for the preservation of humanity. Happy spring, dear reader.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.