In the industrialized world, we have lost touch with how very interwoven our lives are with the plants around us.  We harvest plants for food, but seldom remember that these plants also eat the carbon dioxide we exhale and freely release the oxygen we must breathe to continue our very existence.  Plant materials clothe us, clean us, keep us healthy, provide flowery beauty in our homes, and comprise the basic building blocks of innumerable “manufactured” products we use in our everyday lives.

We have also lost touch with moderation when it comes to plants.  In far too many places we still clear-cut forests to serve our building needs, rather than mindfully harvesting those trees which are truly mature.   It is clear from the increasing rates of obesity and diabetes, as well as anorexia and bulimia, in the “developed” world that we have lost touch with eating in moderation.  Even as people in poorer countries go hungry, most of the foods available in poorer countries were healthier, coming as they did from plant sources closer to Mother Earth, rather than the manufactured foods crowding store shelves in industrialized societies. 

We do not respect the plants which God created.  We seek to tinker and modify, to remake tomatoes in our image of perfection, at the cost of taste and nutritional value.  (biointegrity.org)

In this all-or-nothing oriented world, we have even remade fasting in our own image.  How many people do you know who have given up sweets for Lent?  Is their goal to draw closer to God the creator, or to lose weight? In this Lenten season, we need to remember God’s concept of fasting (see Isaiah 58:1-8) and ask ourselves how we might fast with integrity and intention to draw closer to our Creator—who is also the Creator of that food we eat.

When is the last time you spent “quality time” with a plant—tree, flower, herb or fruit?   What can we receive from spending time with a plant, besides oxygen?  Consider what Mary Oliver received in visiting an oak tree: 

Fletcher Oak

There is a tree here so beautiful it even has a name.  Every morning, when it is still dark, I stand under its branches.  They flow from the thick and silent trunk.  One can’t begin to imagine their weight.  Year after year they reach, they send out smaller and smaller branches, and bunches of flat green leaves, to touch the light.

Of course this has consequences.  Every year the oak tree fills with fruit.  Just now, since it is September, the acorns are starting to fall.

I don’t know if I will ever write another poem.  I don’t know if I am going to live for a long time yet, or even for a while. 

But I am going to spend my life wisely.  I’m going to be happy, and frivolous, and useful.  Every morning, in the dark, I gather a few acorns and imagine, inside of them, the pale oak trees.  In the spring, when I go away, I’ll take them with me, to my own country, which is a land of sun and restless ocean and moist woods.  And I’ll dig down, I’ll hide each acorn in a cool place in the black earth.   

To rise like a slow and beautiful poem.   To live a long time.    

Mary Oliver, White Pine (Harcourt Brace & Co, 1994), p. 39.