Cutting Down the
Bushes
© Sara Mackey
July
4, 2004
This story takes place in July two years ago. The heat was
staggering that summer, came in waves and waves, and even in the
early morning it could be oppressive. It was on one of those early
July mornings that I took my tea out on the stoop, felt the brush
of a thin branch against my arm, and said at last, “This is it.
Today is the day that bush is coming down!”
My
house is rented, and the folks who lived there before me didn’t
have much interest in yard work. I have no interest at all in yard
work, and the result is that the bushes in front of my house were
absolutely out of control. The one beside the stoop had grown
taller than the roof line, with some of the branches draping over
to grab at me as I
went in and out. The ones below the windows had grown up so far
that you couldn’t see out any more. All together, those
overgrown bushes made my house look kind of haunted. I had lived
with the chaos, and disregard for ordinary yard work requirements,
for four years, until that July morning…that day that finally,
finally, the bush was going to come down.
The
task of cutting down the bushes turned into a summer-long marathon
of struggle, frustration, and exhaustion. Because the Universe
knows what it’s doing, that particular summer was also a time of
seeking in my own UU congregation. We were, at that time, trying
to pay careful attention to our identity, our mission, and our
place in the larger community. Just as WUU is doing now. Here,
we’re getting ready to call a settled minister. At my church, we
had finished our building and were growing fast, and after years
of looking inward, at ourselves and out own church’s needs, we
were ready to start looking outward. There were many questions
about our mission and our social action that we needed to ask,
questions that we will be asking each other here as the search
committee goes about its work. In my congregation, we were
intentional about addressing those questions, just as we will be
here at WUU. We organized and attended small group gatherings at
UUCC all summer long. Talking. And talking.
Now,
don’t get me wrong. This process, for each of the congregations,
was and is just that: a process. Please don’t think I’m
bragging when I say we did it well at UU community Church, just as
you will do it well here. But talking about social action, for
example, is not the same as social action, just as worrying about
what to do with the bushes is not the same as cutting down the
bushes. What was it that made one specific hot July morning be the
day that thinking about the bushes stopped, and chopping them down
began? I don’t know. I only know that as the task took me over,
it was impossible to overlook the lessons that the bushes taught
me about the life of my church.
Those
bushes had been outrageous for a long time. I thought about them
whenever I drove up to my house, for over a year. I wished for
disposable income so I could hire somebody with skills and tools
to come take care of them. I wished for skills and tools so I
could take care of them myself. That became my permanent excuse: I
don’t know what to do with them, don’t know how to do it,
don’t have any tools to do it with. It’s beyond me; I can’t
do anything about it. Then one hot July morning, for reasons I
can’t explain and don’t know, things changed. Without skills,
without tools, without knowledge, it was time to face the task.
There’s
a child I know, who comes to stay with me once in a while when her
parents go out of town. She loves to make things out of stuff in
my drawers and all over my desk. One time she made a card for her
mother and asked me for an envelope for it. I didn’t have
anything that fit, so I got a piece of colored paper and began to
fold, adjust, eyeball it.
“Do you know how to make an envelope?” she asked me.
“That’s what this is going to be,” I told her. “It’s not
white, but when I finish, it’s going to be an envelope.”
“No,” she said, “I mean, do you know
how to make an envelope, or are you just making an
envelope?” I didn’t know how to cut down the bushes. I just
cut down the bushes.
Here are some of the things I learned as I journeyed
through this endeavor: without the correct tools, you use the
wrong tools to cut down the bushes. Once the decision has been
made that they’re coming down, you use whatever you have,
including your hands. I had a small hand saw, and I was often in
an awkward position, sticking my hands and arms in toward branches
without actually being able to see what I was doing. I would saw
and saw and saw and saw, thinking, “This is ridiculous. This
little saw is never going to get through this branch. I’m
wasting my time. I’m going to set this bush on fire.” And
then, with no warning…zwoop. The branch was cut through. It
amazed me that the first stroke of the saw, and the second to the
last stroke of the saw, felt the same. There was no clue in the
feel of the sawing that the very next stroke was going to be the
last one. Do we feel
that way in our decision making sometimes? How many more meetings
are we going to have? How many times do we need to go through this
explanation? How many more discussions are we going to organize?
And then, in one meeting, things begin to crystallize. But we
don’t know in, let’s say, the fourth meeting, that the fifth
meeting will be the one where everything comes together and we
find our way to the next step on the path.
Another
thing I learned is that when you don’t have the right tools for
the job, the right tools appear as you do the work. A neighbor
offers a ladder. Another neighbor offers a large trash can so you
can put the trash bag in and fill it more easily. One morning
early I was up on the borrowed ladder, trying to figure out how to
reach what I wanted to cut. I heard my name being shouted, and I
looked across the street. My neighbor was out on her porch, waving
a big cutter and hollering, “Get off that ladder! Get off that
ladder!” I walked across the street, saying hi to her.
“I like to died when I looked out the window and saw you on that
ladder!” she wailed. “You scared me to death! You made me come
out on the porch in my nightgown!”
She insisted that I use her loppers, and said that when I fell off
the ladder, nobody would see me lying on the ground in all the cut
branches. I told her I’d yell if I fell off, and she said,
“Who do you think is gonna hear you with all their windows shut
and their air conditioners on!” My neighbor Joyce was confident
that I was going to fall off the ladder, and when she drove to
work a little later, she lowered her car window and shouted,
“I’m going to work now. You behave yourself in those
bushes!” I wonder sometimes if my neighbors peer out between the
slats of their blinds and try to catch a glimpse of me involved in
my sleazy, behind-the-bushes activities. But the point is, the
most helpful tool that I had for cutting down the bushes was
Joyce’s loppers, and that was a tool I didn’t own, didn’t
know to ask for, didn’t know existed. But my neighbor knew, and
saw me needing it, and gave it to me. When you make the decision
to cut down the bushes, help will come to you, simply because you
need help.
In the winter following that hot summer morning when she came out
on the porch in her nightgown, my neighbor Joyce died
unexpectedly. We were good neighbors, but not close friends, and I
didn’t hear about her death for over a week. It was close to
Christmas; she had a heart attack and did not survive. I had used
Joyce’s loppers pretty energetically and had pulled one handle
off several times. My plan was to keep them through the fall,
using them as I needed them. Then I would buy her a new set of
loppers the following spring, and deliver them to her along with a
copy of this sermon. As I watched her children clean out her house
following her death, I thought about returning the rusty, beat up
loppers to them. But I didn’t; I kept them. I had become fond of
them. They had theological implications for me, and they bear
witness now to the fact that help comes when you need help.
And
speaking of help…as I removed those branches, bit by bit, I
discovered several empty bird nests in the bushes. They were
fascinating, sturdy, beautifully built, and they were evidence
that life originated and flourished and went forth from the chaos
of those untended, unruly bushes. My other part time job is with
the Richmond Public Library system; during the school year I work
in a library in a depressed section of the city. Sometimes my
focus is too narrow; I see people in situations that I find
unsettling or even awful and I feel the desire to plow forward and
change everything. Oh, if only I could rearrange some of these
lives until my version of “better” is created. It’s useful
at such times to remember those bird nests, evidence of the fact
that even though I did not want those bushes, even though I
declared them a problem, life thrived and emerged from them.
Without my help.
Also
without my help, weeds flourished. In fact, as I got more and more
bushes cut down, I realized that some of what was growing in front
of the house was not bushes at all, but weeds that had been
growing there for so long that they had become bushes. Some had
trunks thicker than my thumb, and twined around until they were
keeping the other bushes…the real bushes…from thriving. How
did that happen, I wondered? I recognized some of the weeds as the
same plant that grew on the ground out back, spreading on runners
around the back patio. It’s hard to imagine how they grew into
bushes, how long that must have taken. These were plants that were
not invited, not tended, not encouraged, and yet they grew into
large, tenacious, powerful, foliage. How did that happen? It
happened not because anybody ever helped them, but because nobody
stopped them.
We
believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. We
believe in justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. We
believe in the interdependent web of all existence. And that means
we Unitarian
Universalists often struggle with the question of when to say
STOP, or even if we should say stop. Several women were talking at
a conference I attended some time ago; one was telling about a
difficult person in a group she belonged to. “She eventually
destroyed the group,” this woman said. Someone else at the table
said, “I’d like you to say that another way. Say we let her
destroy the group, because we didn’t stop her.” This is an
unsettling question for me, and I don’t have any wise advice or
any answers to offer. Only questions to ask, and I put this
forward as a question: how do we tell the difference between
exercising the right to entitled freedom, and doing harm? Is it OK
to do harm while you are exercising your right to freedom? Who
gets to decide if it’s harm? And how do we know when to say
stop?
Sometimes,
knowing when to stop something is mercifully clear. In my back
yard, in the far corner, there is a brush pile where I dragged
some of the stuff I cut down. I would chop for a while, and then
when I got tired, drag for a while. Chop and drag, chop and drag,
all morning. Morning was the only time to work; the heat was too
oppressive later in the day. When I began to get hot I would
decide about breaks: I’ll drag this pile of stuff to the brush
pile, and then I’ll sit down. I’ll saw one more branch off and
then I’ll get some water. But there were moments when my flesh
and bones, without any help from my intellect, made the decisions
on the spot. My body would say right now, not in two more trips to
the brush pile or two more strokes of the saw, but right now,
it’s time to get in the shade. Or, this is the moment, not one
minute from now, when it’s time to drink water.
What a relief to be reminded that you don’t have to know
everything, don’t have to make all the decisions. Sometimes your
body knows, even when your intellect thinks it’s in charge, and
your body’s wisdom can be trusted. Once in a while, our
intellects aren’t what we need to go by. When we’re doing the
work of the church, or justice work, it’s not usually so clear,
but there are times when our hearts and spirits know that we have
to stop one thing, or start another.
What
I learned that summer about cutting down the bushes is this: it
doesn’t take skills, it doesn’t take correct tools, it
doesn’t take plans, it doesn’t take a vision of how it will
look when it’s finished, although those things surely do help.
But what it takes is the decision, and the declaration, that the
bushes are coming down. Everything else flows from that
declaration. The flow is not smooth; it is not gentle and
soothing. Transformation is difficult. It makes us exhausted,
frustrated and disheartened at times. It’s grisly, breathtaking,
painful, exhilarating, and surprising. It’s beautiful, dirty,
stunning, and heartbreaking. And transformation is worth
everything that it costs us.
And so may
it be.
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