Unintended consequences

I hope I didn’t cause the birds to stay around longer than normal this year.

I’m worried that my Edenesque backyard is too comfortable for my birds.

It is like primordial soup, exhibiting the full cycle of life.

My backyard should be on the tour for a Biology class visit, but it might turn everyone into Buddhists, believing in the cycle of Life.

I was transplanting a few Salvia seedlings into my backyard fence garden today.

Afterward, in contemplation about nothing, I watched a small finch fly in to my latticework.

“That was nice,” I thought.  A few minutes later, another came, and then another.

I thought it was the same one, and he or she was being cautious.  But when I rose to leave the patio, a dozen finches rose in unison and flew away.  That’s when I became worried about them. 

The backyard was a secondary project for the past several years.  The composting this year has been a focal point.  Composting was a catalyst that has made the patio a meditation sanctuary for me.  I’ve always been organic, avoided toxins, planted attractors, used compost, and took classes.

 

I went a step further last year.  I composted four yards of detritus from my backyard and kitchen, with worms.  I’m on my way to doing another four yards this year.  I built a fence-line, garden-box bed requiring, magically, four cubic yards of compost.

I started the year by buying fours yards of compost from Grab-And-Grow.  All this compost has changed my garden over the last twelve months.

Besides a testimonial for going organic, this is a full circle of life testimonial.

I have watched my garden boxes grow from empty vessels to food storage compartments, then wombs for seeds and seedlings.  The sun, water, and organic nutrients worked together to create striving early life.

Lately, I’ve watched the bugs and bees visiting to enjoy the wares of flowers and other floral delicacies.

It all progressed so quickly – today the birds, which were eating the bugs, which were licking the nectars.

And the detritus, ten feet away, in a compost pile, rotting for the benefit of a microbial community, feeding my worms, who may eventually feed the birds, but whose by-product will certainly feed next year’s plants.

I am an observer of this “rich pageant of life” and want to be a part of it.

Not as burned ash, but as a rotting corpse, food for all the biota, and the chain of life above.