Meditation for May 15th
Mow the Lawn
Lawns are as American as apple pie and Indian killing. You can’t have a quaint picture of American living without showing house after house with their perfectly manicured green lawns. The American dream is having the greenest, lushest, and thickest lawn with a perfect length in front of their home, while neighbors look on with jealousy.
Lawns are a sign of conformity, uncreativity, and environmental neglect. People feel like they have to have a lawn or the Red-White-and-Blue-Gestapo will come and take it away. Lawns say you had no idea what you wanted to do with a plot of land, so you grow grass. Lawns say you cannot think outside a tiny box.
According to most anthropological and historical texts, lawns became popular with the French Queen Joanna of Bourbon. She had a strange fetish for being a milkmaid but despised the sight and smell of dairy cows, so she planted large grass fields and pranced around the lawns, singing and pretending to be off to milk the cows. A mad woman invented lawns.
Lawns became popular in America after World War II, and Scotts Miracle-Gro Company’s advertising promoted them as a great stress-relieving hobby. A whole industry boomed after millions of Americans began growing lawns in their front and back yards. So, a sign of American masculinity was invented by a French woman playing cosplay.
Like golf courses, lawns are environmentally devastating. Not just the use of herbicides and pesticides, but gas used in lawn mowers, edgers, and billions of gallons of water to keep the lawns looking green. The grasses used in lawns aren’t even American native plants but are from Europe and the Middle East. Kentucky Bluegrass is from the Middle East – you know, where terrorists come from.
Lawns are unsightly. They present a boring man’s paradise with no imagination or creative vision. Just dumping wildflower seeds all over is cleverer than a lawn. The only thing that can outdo the boring lawn is to accent the lawn with shrubs.
Prayer
Veles,
Stop the boring.
Your cattle aren’t allowed a taste of the forbidden lawns of man.
The Suburban Tribes keep large plots of grazing grounds,
But they keep no cattle, sheep, or pigs.
Sometimes they keep dogs and cats,
But these animals hunt,
Not graze.
Give these lawns your cattle.
Let your sheep taste the emerald blades.
Find a home for the buffalo on the front property of a suburban home,
Grazing in a herd,
Like it used to look in the Great Plains.
Send your moles to make the flat green prairies into a brown pile mountain range.
Let the moles push the unnecessary grass and churn it into soil.
I see no point in so much grass that no mouth will graze.
Please send in the cud-eating mammals, Veles, and show the humans how worthless their lawns are.
Amen.
Craft
Capture a mole or more and release them into the best lawn you see.
Guerilla garden. In the middle of the night, tear up the lawn and grow plants that will grow in that environment.
Instead of a lawn, use a ground cover like St. John’s Wort or Forget-Me-Nots.
Instead of a lawn, grow flowers and attractive plants so people can enjoy your yard when they walk by.
Give the owners of a large lawn some goats.
Learn what native plants would work instead of lawns.
Aphids.
Goal
Lawns are ugly. Let’s stop growing them. Change, or you’ll keep rolling a lawn.
Dave you missed out on a big one here in Oregon. We grow most of the worlds lawn seed. One of the few things that grows well in the willamette Vally’s clay damp soil.