Change
comes to my garden, whether I plan it or not. The three-year-rule
is planned change. To restate from an
earlier blog; it is where I give a plant three years in one location to thrive,
or it gets moved to another location. In
that case, I decide that something isn’t working, and make the change. Other changes to my garden are completely by
surprise. Some changes surprise me and they
shouldn’t.
Once-in-awhile
a plant doesn’t return after the winter. I don’t fully understand why. It may have returned for three or four years,
then suddenly one year it just doesn’t. Maybe
the winter was just too rough. We get
some pretty tough winters here in Ohio, and there are times I wonder if I’ll
return in the spring.
Sometimes,
a plant just fades away, midseason. I
might see it coming, I’ll try some form of intervention, and it still doesn’t
work. There are places in my yard that appear to be “dead zones”. No matter what I do, or what type of plant
goes in there, it might last a year or two but it’s still going to die. Is it the soil, drainage? I can’t explain it.
Finally,
there’s the change I should expect. Plants like all living things just don’t last
forever. It is the natural order of things. There are upward limits, which vary from one
type of plant to another but, the end is the same.
Even
if we set aside the morose end-of life discussion, there is an ebb and flow to
all of life. Institutions, cultures,
even economies, go through cycles. There
is a place in our minds where we humans seem to believe that there isn’t a
natural end of those kinds of things. Failure
to anticipate and be prepared to respond can lead to ruin. The American
automobile industry was almost brought to its knees because it failed to see
the major changes taking place with the consumer, and change with them.
I’m
a bit of a history buff. I wonder what
it was like to live in the last years of the Roman Empire. Did the citizens remember what had been? Could they see the end coming? Were they even aware that the culture was in a
steep decline? Did they believe the
“end” would actually happen? Were the
same things true of the Czar’s Russia, or the Incas?
One
of the background themes in Ten Days
is the decline of a culture. There are
hints within the book, which will be explored more in the sequels, of what has
led to the end of this fictional country.
The
characters of Ten Days are caught-up
in this unexpected change. Everything
they have known is in the process of being swept away by forces they can’t
control. By the time we catch up with them in the book, they know the end is
coming. Yet, there is a strong
undercurrent of denial. The end cannot possibly be happening. Like most of us, they try to maintain a sense
of hope, in a hopeless situation.
I
walk through my garden almost daily. Part
of the reason for doing so is to manage the garden, be aware of what’s happening,
and try to be proactive. Maybe, like my walking
through my garden to assess what’s going on, we should be aware of the ebb and
flows within our own lives and culture.
It’s
possible we can reverse some of those changes. Maybe we just have to accept them. Another option is to be proactive and come up
with a plan to deal with the change. To
my way of thinking, denial is never a good plan.
