On Weeds and Life

Tonight, we watched a DVD about Pete Seeger's life.  It was touching, inspiring, filled with good thoughts, good ideas, good ideals, and also good music.  He is a lesson for us all, although I doubt if many of us would be able to take the equivalent of being blacklisted for 17 years as well as he did.  I met him once, years ago in Los Angeles, when I was doing publicity for a folk music club that was sponsoring one of his concerts.  I had dinner with him the night before the concert, along with a dozen other people.  He was charismatic even over dinner. 

And now he must be close to 90 years old, and seems as strong and lively and filled with hope as ever.  Good for him.  For myself, not so strong and lively and filled with hope, I think, but this may largely be a result of the remarkable heat we have had for the past three days.  I can't complain too much, because it didn't even get to be 90 degrees (although it was 88 in the house), and the 'heat wave' lasted only for three days (tomorrow it's supposed to be back to 67 degrees).  But, I did notice that every day of extra warmth produced about a ton more bindweed blooming in the more difficult places to reach in my yard.

A friend says that we are lucky to be living in a place where even the worst weeds are beautiful.  This seems to me to be the wrong message: if they're so beautiful, why am I trying to get rid of them?  And the answer is because there will be nothing out there BUT bindweed if I don't keep at the task.

This summer, grandchildren have been around quite a bit.  Both the grandchildren and their parents have been more than happy to help us with the many bits of work that need always to be done, but no one is very anxious to help with weeding, I find.  In fact, I saw in my 13-y/o granddaughter's eyes, as she watched me weeding, weeding, the conviction that I was nuts.  After all, the thing is, I pull them up, and then they grow back next year.  Don't I see that this is going nowhere? 

Well, to everything there is a season and also a time for every purpose under heaven.  And in this season, my purpose is to pull up those bindweeds, even though their roots may stretch lo unto many feet in length and even though they will return next year.  Did Seeger give up just because wars keep occurring?.  I think Pete Seeger would, if not admire my dedication, at least recognize a similarity between us with respect to sticking to one's view of what is the right thing to do, even though others might think it foolish or even wrong.  His life has been spent encouraging peace and harmony and group singing and generosity and compassion.  At the moment, mine feels like it has been spent at war with crab grass and its fellow noxious weeds, bindweed being only one of the latest in a long line.  Maybe tomorrow, out in the fields of bindweed, I'll try singing 'We Shall Overcome."