A rusted-out wreck. Pollution. An eye sore. But over the years this old hulk may very well have become a fox’s den, a hollow for a bee hive, a rabbit’s safe haven.
Has something that someone else has discarded been re-born as something useful to you?
A telephone booth may well be the most recent obsolete item of our modern age. You don’t have be all that old to remember the fad of seeing how many people you could stuff in a phone booth, let alone identifying with Clark Kent’s iconic changing station or thriller movies in which the bad guy makes contact via pay phone. In an age where smart phones are the norm, there’s not much point to phone booths taking up room on the sidewalk. But it can be hard to see them go.
What nostalgic, unnecessary thing do you love?
In 1988 hundreds of thousands of acres of Yellowstone National Park were burned in massive wildfires. The devastation was immense, but the lodgepole pines that make up most of the park’s forest depend on fire to release their seeds. When the rains returned, up to a million seeds per acre began to grow.
What has been the rain that allowed new life to return for you after a time of loss?
It is possible to propagate trees so that trunks weave together in a complicated basket weave. But it’s you can to work too hard at making something fancy when something simpler—just a tree—might prove more attractive.
What in your life could use simplifying?
Today, in the Northern Hemisphere, the light is at its longest and summer officially begins. It always seems a bit strange to mark the start of summer’s bright season on the day that we begin the long, slow descent toward the dark, but summer’s richness is all the sweeter for knowing that it can’t last.
What do you treasure because of, not in spite of, its impermanence?
