Role Player
I stood on the porch yesterday and watched the rain start to fall. The leaf litter on the drive twitched with memories of life as the raindrops fell until the drops became a torrent and the leaves began to float. Then they huddled together to begin their journey to becoming organic matter, sending nutrients back to the parental trees who once bore them, decaying into a new life. A virtuous cycle.
In my suburban gardening life, I was always a mulch man. The tips of the shortened blades of lawn grass were deposited back into the lawn. Leaves were mowed to pieces. Decay was the creation of new organic matter. It was needed by the living, the plants and trees and the tiny creatures of the lawn who toiled beneath the surface to survive. I liked earthworms and thought of them as my friends, encouraged them, and gave them as much food as I thought they might need.
I assume my character in this regard was shaped by the slow winds of my life. Exposure to Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman along with more than a few Ash Wednesdays in which I was reminded of my origins and the inevitability of my own return to dust. I was part of nature and had a role in nature and needed to protect nature because I was nature. I was trained by the beauty of the trees to give them water and feed them until such a time as I was as lifeless as the leaves on my driveway and off to perform my new role, offering myself in full to the wider world.