Through our virtual programming series, Nature in your Neighborhood, we challenged volunteers to go out into their neighborhoods or backyards to see what plants sparked their interest. Whether plants are native or non native, we can all appreciate a connection to nature and the curiosity that it can spark!
By: Greg MacWilliams
Plants offer us insight into problems we are solving. They offer us pieces to a puzzle we didn’t know we were working on. Marigolds are trying to tell us something at the present moment. I find Marigolds growing by the side of the path, where I have walked and not moved, looked and not seen, listened and not heard. It is stillness amidst change, constancy in a world of flux. It is in looking at our world that we might understand, rather than sleepwalking through a labyrinth of routine. Ignorance is suffering, Buddha says, and through trying to amend an ever changing world, we know less and less, and forget ourselves. Marigolds remind me of what stays the same amidst unprecedented and increasing change. We are a part of nature as much as anything else in the universe. If we listen to what it has to say, we realize our potential for silence amidst a world of loud voices.
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