Plant Baby Plant
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Doomscrolling on Instagram two weeks ago, I came upon Plant Baby Plant Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call to creative resistance for a greener future. In this very short video she says, We will enact tree justice so that every corner of our neighborhoods have the healing benefits of nature. The highly respected author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer invites us to reimagine our actions. She speaks out for plants in gardens, wetlands, prairies, and parking lots. Find out more here and how you can join Plant Baby Plant.
An Interest in Giant Sequoias
When I was a kid in the 5th or 6th grade in elementary school, we were given a science research deadline. I became fascinated with the sequoia tree for my project. It is the largest tree on earth, and grows from a very tiny seed. From my distant perch in the Chicago suburbs, I studied in intimate detail the life cycle of the sequoias of the west coast of California, never imagining that someday I would get to meet them face to face, in person.
Little did I know as I was obsessing over sequoias in the Midwest, that many miles away in New Mexico, a kid and his parents had already planted a sequoia in their yard. I was a toddler when they planted this seed. I did not know these people until many years later. For me in grade school, New Mexico was the land of resilient tribes, handmade adobes, tall mountains, and very dry desert. It interested me deeply. Yet I had no idea at that time that I might actually live, and probably die, here in New Mexico.
The sequoia planted by the boy and his family a few blocks from Canyon Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the 1950s took root and grew. Some seventy years later it towers hundreds of feet over its quiet neighborhood, blessing everyone who passes it with its improbable presence. It takes 500 to 750 years for a sequoia to reach its full height. They can live for 3,000 years or more. This young giant sequoia in our town is a steady source of encouragement for hundreds, perhaps thousands of us humans. Millions of us, if you include the bugs, birds, and microbes who live within its shelter.
You can watch the first year of a sequoia’s growth here, if you like, with brief directions on how to grow a giant sequoia.
How Communities Happen
Some two decades after this tree was planted, a radiant young Catholic girl from upstate New York, Margie, takes up Buddhist practice. She meets the sequoia-planting boy Steve in a Zen center back east. They marry and ultimately return to his home state to make a life together here.
Another decade or two after that I fall for a guy who grew up not far from the sequoias of northern California and who briefly lived in their midst going to college. Gord had been tempted as a young man to catch a boat to Japan to pursue Zen meditation practice. Instead he left home in the dark of night and hitchhiked across country to land at the same Rochester Zen Center that was Margie and Steve’s place of meditation. They all became friends.
Many members of the Rochester Zen Center moved here to New Mexico to found another center, what would become Mountain Cloud in the early 1980s. When I married Gord, his dowry was a shimmering bunch of deeply nourishing people, his community, among them, Margie and Steve.
My friends Steve and Margie have nurtured a lot in their lives besides this one precious sequoia tree. It still lives in the yard where it was first planted (of course). It feels emblematic of all they have offered in their lives, quietly, steadily. Deep presence.
An Invitation to Plant Baby Plant
With Plant Baby Plant Robin Wall Kimmerer is inviting more of us to take what can seem like an improbably gamble, planting for the next seven generations (or more). Who knows, maybe we’ll be as successful as Steve and Margie and their family.
Right now there are kids being born far away from one another who will meet and create community together in the future. What trees they’ll plant, what communities they’ll grow, we have no idea. The combination of plants, humans, animals, microbes, current events is endless.
With Plant Baby Plant Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us to be open. To act from the seed values inside us to make them manifest. Plants are tender beings in the face of the slogan – and the reality – Drill Baby Drill. Yet in the midst of profoundly insecure times, we can act for the coming generations. We can act for now.
Whether our efforts will bear fruit, we have no idea. All we can do is act for life, community, integrity, all sentient beings.
Discover more about Plant Baby Plant here.
Read this and other Substack posts here.
Image: This morning my neighbors the ponderosas (The ponderosa is an evergreen relative of the sequoia, but – this is not a sequoia. It is a pondo.)
Author note: While I’ve lived in northern New Mexico for over fifty years, I didn’t get to meet the Sequoia until about 37 years ago. Easy Healing Drinks is my most recent book, shot here in New Mexico with photographer Renee Lynn.