Storming heaven

It felt like pulling a scrambling escapee down from a fence. Gotcha; come on back down. Reluctantly, it let go its grip and tumbled to earth, where I was waiting to cut it into pieces.

This Oriental bittersweet,called a 'thug' plant by some horticulturists, is a vine that strangles trees and shrubs, very difficult to kill, and expanding its range at the expense of its native cousin, the American bittersweet. I got a sense of this when I tackled the dense tangle in my side yard within which, somewhere, was a lilac bush.

I confess I had not paid attention to this area for a year, maybe two. That was enough; the lilac had been engulfed, and enlisted to serve as step ladder for penetration of the big oak above, up which the vine was racing to...what?...storm heaven itself.

Reading Bernd Heinrich's Summer World these days, I'm mightily impressed by the relentless, merciless opportunism of organisms. He devotes chapters to wasps, caterpillars, birds, frogs...and in each details how each is under intense pressure to grow, get ready to mate, and reproduce in short windows of opportunity while constantly targeted by greedy predators, themselves under similar stress.

This afternoon on my porch, recovering from the morning's bittersweet struggle, I saw a small bird, perhaps a sparrow, land on my porch shrub, look sharply around, hop to other branches, look again, and fly off. Now I understand what it was doing: looking for caterpillars hidden, camouflaged, immobile or otherwise trying to escape notice. The bright eye of the bird scanned the little bush thoroughly, found nothing and left. Whew! must have thought any caterpillar (if any were there), near miss.

The activity is incessant, the production prodigious, the losses tremendous. I realized with new clarity: every living thing is somebody's food. That there are beautiful forms and elegant strategies is a natural product of this unceasing jostling for space, searching for food, attracting a mate, consummating, producing another generation.

In this context, friendship, exploration and hospitality seem a little precious; of course, social collaboration, reconnaissance, symbiosis and other behaviors which resemble (perhaps actually express) these are natural phenomena. What I think makes these principles for us more than just strategies is their 2nd person character inspired by the relationship of God-in-love and the Beloved.

Wading into this mess with nothing but clippers and bare hands, I was finally able to extract the vines from the tree and lilac from the vines. A big heap of flexible stems and soft, oval leaves attached with green petioles (these leaves must have squeezed out of the stem like toothpaste) lay ready to be bundled on the grass. The lilac, extricated, looks airy and relieved. However, a nest with a blue egg that had been constructed in the matted knot up in the tree had been tipped nearly over and almost dislodged by my violence. What a deeply snarled world we live in.