I’ve written here before about Sara Stein’s book, Noah’s Garden, a book about restoring the ecology of our yards and gardens. Now I’m paying attention to a passage at the very end of the book where she imagines what it would be like if we were to begin to create a network of these restored, and interconnected, gardens.
Will it work? she asks.
Will the turtle return?
Will the fox come by?
She directs these questions to a gentleman at the Bureau of Wildlife Management. And he responds. “Yes, if there are corridors.”
Stein writes:
Words are tricky things. ‘Corridor’ is an ecological term that disarmingly conjures up a stroll along a pathway between, say, Mr. Shneckenburger’s land and ours. A turtle might, indeed, stroll from his pond, along his stream, over the road that separates our properties or thorugh the culvert below it and, once safely among the skunk cabbages, meander upstream to arrive after a while at our shore. . . But the ecological meaning of corridors is both figuratively and literally broader.
The movement of animals over longer periods of time than one turtle’s amble after a mate in breeding season is similar to those fireworks that, impelled by pressure from the center, burst outward, then burst again from each spreading fragment.
A corridor as a series of bursts? Starbursts?
She writes:
What is meant by corridors, then, is not narrow strips along which animals might walk from one remote refuge to another, as our own young these days travel along the highways, but a continuity of living quarters among which movement is generational—by dispersal, not migration—from patch to patch along networks that may well originate in parklands or reservations but that must spread through all of our back yards.
The repopulation of each person’s land therefore depends on neighbors, on whether they stop the flow of breeding—dampen bursts and snuff out sparks that would ignite new life beyond their boundaries—or feed the spread by what they plant and how they plant it.
Corridor—it’s a rich and complex image as she presents it here.
And for me, this image, along with making me want to plant more blueberry bushes, and also butterfly weed, brings to mind a notion I've been carrying around for a while now—a kind of healing corridor—made up of centers of healing—actual places but also virtual places—including books and websites—each spreading out from a center like fireworks, like starbursts.
__________________________________________
Toward this end, I'm finally getting around to putting up some sites on my Resource page on One Year of Writing and Healing. I’m calling the page Healing Corridor and am posting three sites on it this week. A beginning--and one I plan to expand on over time.
