July - Bending for the Future

There exists a tiny herb native to Brazil, first named in 2011. Like most plants, it springs up, blooms, gets pollinated, and then its flowers disappear having done their part. Soon capsules of fruit appear, holding seeds of the succeeding generation. The magic occurs next, when the fruit-tipped stems begin bending toward the earth, like a genuflection, giving it the botanical name *Spigelia genuflexa. The stems keep bending, even after meeting with the moss underneath. They bend and bend, burying the seed in the moss, thus planting their own seeds! The ”mother” plant gives the future generation the best chance at survival by its behavior of planting seeds where they would most likely germinate in an unpredictable environment!

If only we were so wise, taking the cue to bend, or change ourselves, with the goal of truly providing for the future; however, we humans seem to want to provide for the future without bending to the reality of our present environment. 

Satish Kumar, philosopher and ecologist, says it this way: “So the solution is not just to replace fossil fuels with bio-fuels, but to replace quantitative consumerism with qualitative lifestyle. We need to move away from more-and-global to less-and-local, from acquisitiveness to frugality, from accumulation to enjoyment, from employment to livelihood, and from desire to delight…from materialism to spirituality, from consumption of natural resources to appreciation of the natural world.”

The Latin word genuflexa implies a bending to the sacred, a recognition of the Holy. The behaviors Satish Kumar lays out above seem to be marking a sacred path, one that is willing to sacrifice for a truly sustainable future.

In the encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis asks, "What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us, to children who are now growing up?” This makes me question: Is recycling without changing our purchasing habits an exercise in futility? Is continuing our excessive traveling, even in an electric vehicle, wanting to have our cake and eat it, too? Can we feel good about eating the processed “Impossible Burger” instead of adjusting our palate to appreciate whole foods? Are our behaviors germinating a viable future, or are we kidding ourselves?

(*Information about Spigelia genuflexa came to me from Zoe Schlanger's book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.)



Photo by Jean-Yves Matroule on Unsplash (*not a Spigelia genuflexa)  

July, 2024