Stars, Sand, and Snowflakes – Some Garden Philosophizing

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Hamlet Act 1 Scene 5

Working in the garden can make me philosophical at times. What’s going on in my head is usually not related to what my hands are doing. Mowing and weeding don’t require a lot of mental focus. Sometimes I work mindlessly with some song playing over and over in my brain, but other times, I find myself contemplating some very big ideas. Last week was mostly a big ideas week.

I can remember times in my early life when I felt really smart, like I had a pretty good idea about how things were. I understood. I’d figured it all out. For instance, when I got a perfect score on a difficult exam and thought I had mastered that subject. Or when I’d finished reading a book and felt I knew all there was to know about whatever topic it covered. I’m sure I had a good dose of teenage hubris that made me obnoxious. That might have lasted well beyond my teenage years. But at some point, I finally realized that I knew next to nothing about anything. Socrates is supposed to have said “True wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.” In that case, I am truly wise.

A morning last week.

One of my deepest philosophical moments last week came to me while I was out in the garden after dark, looking up at the night sky. I think my first inklings concerning the limits of my knowledge probably came to me at some point in my youth while looking at the stars. I love to look at the night sky and we live in a good place to do that. In all the eastern part of the country, we are noted here in Potter County for our dark skies. Stargazers travel from all over to visit Cherry Springs State Park, a few miles from here, to watch the sky. We’ve gone to several stargazing events there. But we are lucky because we have just as good a view right here on our property. On a clear night, the sky is unbelievably beautiful here. To see it fills me with awe. I am overcome by the vastness of it all and how tiny my place in it is. The words of King David always come to me: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:3) and “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” (Psalm 19:1)

In 1995, over the course of ten days, the Hubble Telescope aimed its lens at a dark spot in space, an area near the constellation Ursa Major that looked empty, a tiny area the equivalent of holding a pinhead at arms length. The image it produced, known as the Hubble Deep Field, was one of the most awe inspiring things I’d ever seen. In that tiny patch of space, the Hubble revealed 3,000 distant galaxies. Not stars, but galaxies, each one containing billion of stars. In 2004, the Hubble took another exposure, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, that contained 10,000 galaxies, the most distant ones 12 billion light years away. Astronomers have looked even further than that and the further they look, the more they see. And the more they see, the more they realize the limits of their knowledge. With all they know, or think they know, their theories and postulations, they keep encountering new things that don’t fit, things they can’t explain, new things they’ve never seen or imagined before. I cannot begin to grasp any of it.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field image.

The other day, I saw a microscopic photograph of sand that reminded me of the Hubble Deep Field photo. It was just common sand of the sort we walk and play upon without giving it much thought. And yet seen closely, the grains are amazing. I read that a few years ago, a group of researchers at the University of Hawaii tried to calculate the number of grains of sand on the Earth. They said, “if you assume a grain of sand has an average size and you calculate how many grains are in a teaspoon and then multiply by all the beaches and deserts in the world, the Earth has roughly (and we're speaking very roughly here) 7.5x10^18 grains of sand, or seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains.” Compare that to number of stars that astronomers estimate are in the universe, 7x10^22(that’s 70 thousand million, million, million), or even the 1.75x10^27 snowflakes that they estimate fall in just one year – and no two of them alike – and you can begin to sense the vastness of creation and how little we can even pretend to comprehend.

That brought to mind a line from William Blake’s poem Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Microphoto of sand.

Hollyhocks.

To bring all of this back down to a more mentally manageable level, I decided to refocus my contemplations on my gardens. I am the steward of about two acres of land. If I add in the Shillig’s property, which I also help tend to some degree, it comes out to about five acres. I’ve been tending this little piece of land for many years now. I like to think I know all about its features – all the dips and bulges, the stony parts, the fertile parts, the number of its trees. But that’s my hubris acting up again. I don’t really know much at all. I see surfaces and broad patterns when, woven through it all, there is a universe of unseen life as vast in its scope and as mysterious to me as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, or sand, or snowflakes. The amount of microscopic life in just a cubic foot of my garden’s soil is incomprehensible to me – tens of billions to trillions of microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes, and numerous invertebrates and insects. And I walk over it, dig into it, thinking in my arrogant ignorance that I am the master of it. Then the dazzling thought occurs to me that I might not understand it, but God does. As the Creator of heaven and earth and all things that in them are, he knows how it all works – the microbes, the sand, the snowflakes, the stars. He knows how it all fits together, the laws that govern it from the most minuscule subatomic particle to the movement of galaxies through space.

A sunrise last week.

Now to return from deep thoughts to the ordinary day to day stuff of life. We had some weather last week. Storms on Monday and Tuesday, and rain on Wednesday. The storms were windy. They blew my potted plants off the back porch stairs. Monday’s storm blew down a large limb from one of my big maple trees and scattered lots of little branches and twigs across the yard. Luckily, that was the only damage. Most of the rain fell on Wednesday afternoon. After that, the weather cooled a bit – too cool for my liking. The days have been in the high 70s, but it has been in the 40s the last couple of mornings. I don’t want that. I want summer heat.

The storm on Monday also blew down one of the huge old maples on the property where Stacey works. It fell across a road and had to be sawed up right away. That turned out to be a boon for me. I’ve been looking for freshly cut maple logs for several months to grow mushrooms on. Stacey brought home some logs from that tree and on Wednesday I began my foray into mushroom growing. I drilled holes in the logs and tapped pieces of wooden dowel inoculated with lion’s mane mycelium into them. Then I sealed the holes with beeswax to keep undesirable fungi from entering. This week I hope to procure two more logs and start some shitake mushrooms. It will be a long time before any mushrooms emerge, maybe as long as a year. I hope I have success. I’ve been wanting to grow mushrooms for several years now.

My mushroom logs.

Wednesday afternoon’s rain arrived at the usual time – chore time. It had just started when I headed down to the barn but while I was there, it got heavier. I waited a while hoping it would let up, but then gave up and ran for it. It was warm rain, so I didn’t mind getting wet.

Speaking of the barn, a pair of robins have made a nest in a tree near the barn at the corner of the chicken yard. The nest is in the crotch of the trunk right at eye level. I’ve had robins fuss at me before when I got too close to a nest, but these robins actually attack me. I have to go by that nest several times a day going to and from the barn and every time, they fly at me, squawking, swooping so close to my head that I can feel the wind off their wings. They keep it up as I go most of the way across the front yard. I’ve never seen such aggressive robins before. I can’t wait for their babies to leave so they’ll stop harassing me.

The aggressive robins' nest.

Yesterday we went to the temple. We had a great experience, as we always do. On our way home, we stopped at the Big Dipper in Alfred Station for lunch – pulled pork sandwiches and afterward, ice cream. I got a scoop of lemon ice cream that was amazing. When we got home, I went to work in the garden. It was a beautiful afternoon. I pulled a lot of weeds.

The pigs are getting bigger.

This Sabbath morning was another of those very quiet mornings that I love. When I went down to do the morning chores, even the robins were quiet. The sunrise was pale and there was a very heavy dew. The world seemed relaxed and refreshed. Now that church is over and lunch is almost ready, I feel relaxed and refreshed too.

Morning in the meadow.

The week ahead will be busy with the usual tasks. I have lots of tending to do as I’m starting to clean out flowerbeds, pulling up spent plants, weeding, digging up sections to redistribute bulbs. Rain is coming and I need to mow tomorrow before it starts. I will start pulling up and processing carrots. I need to start processing the garlic we pulled up last week. I think I’ll have enough cucumbers to can a batch of relish and maybe enough raspberries to make jelly. I have to work at reenforcing parts of the fence around the pigpen. They’ve dug some holes that need to be blocked before they attempt an escape. There’s always something to do, sometimes too much. The Thayns are coming up to spend some time with us later in the week. That will be fun. And time will roll on as we speed through what’s left of July.