Author Wendell Berry wrote about how he, for years, would walk to town and pass by an old galvanized metal bucket hanging on a post. He writes, “How many autumns it has hung there
I do not know, but over the years leaves have fallen into it, rain and snow have too. The leaves have held the moisture, and in doing so have rotted. Nuts, too, have fallen into it, or were brought there by squirrels, which ate the meat and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have entered it died and decayed; birds have scratched in it left their droppings, maybe a feather or two. This slow work of death and decay, the chief work of the world, has produced in the bottom of this bucket several inches of loam, rich soil.”
From debris to rich soil, this bucket is a picture of change. In one way we might see it as a place of rot, when it is also a place of life. Berry ends his poem, “to me it is, for all of its simplicity, the Book of Genesis redux.”
In nature we see this transition happen over again, slowly, but always in flux. Burnt forests are on their way to becoming new forests, ponds are drying up and becoming meadows and beavers are turning valleys into lakes. Fields are plowed under to become cities and in some neighbourhoods in Detroit, homes crumble and give way to urban vegetable farms. Everything is on its way to becoming something else.
We like to think that everything will stay the same, that our world is static and that we will enjoy what we made forever. We might not believe this, but we act like it is so. We work for the weekend. But there is, of course, more to us than that. We change and grow too. Our worst losses become the soil in which new opportunities grow, and our best successes last only so long. Our lives, we discover, are seasonal. We grow, we reach, we create, and we become something else.
There is deeply good news in this. When we see our city, community, neighbourhood, and family as a group of people who are on their way to becoming something else, we can live with hope. We can nurture our community and help it become what we hope it could be. We can learn new ways to thrive, and discover that an end is also a beginning.
In these hard days marked by pandemics and sadness, we are learning, often painfully, the process of becoming something else. We can choose to change and discover who we are becoming, and that change can be beautiful in us. We can see that galvanized bucket as a place of collected debris, or as a strangely wonderful host for new life. Wisdom allows us to see it as both.
I find great comfort in thinking that all things are becoming something else. It is not up to me to stop the hands of time and fight against whatever comes my way. With peace I am learning to lose well, enjoy this moment well, and live with patient expectation that something will grow well.
Nothing in our world is as it was, everything is on its way to becoming something else. So I wonder too, who am I becoming?
