Going Native

Jack in the Pulpit Seeds - www.denniskalma.com

I have been feeling disoriented and directionless since I returned from Neebish Island. Refreshed from a week of me time, I had thought I would returned home energized. Instead, the opposite happened. I have been going through the motions of daily life but finding myself disconnected from it.

Sleepless nights and days filled with forced activities came to a head this morning. Through my ennui, I had failed to realize that the days here in Northern Michigan are shortening. Without the schedule demands of my clients, I had begun to awaken when the sun rose and suddenly it is dark at 7 am. Still in bed, I grabbed my NOOK and began to read my emails. There had been a message from Prairie Moon Nursery (http://www.prairiemoon.com/) promoting a sale on bare root Jack in the Pulpit plants. This caught my attention and I immediately went to the website to see what there was to buy.

Buying is my antidote to times of uncertainty. Sometimes it leads to new passions, like buying a seat in a historic preservation class or picking up a new bird field guide. Then there are the not so good times, like impulsive clothing purchases that after one wearing, get bundled up and taken to the Salvation Army thrift store.

Prairie Moon specializes in native plants of the Great Lakes region. I had thought about planting a butterfly garden this fall in an area of the yard that has lain fallow for years. During my search for butterfly appropriate plants, I had found Prairie Moon and signed up for email updates.

Rather than go right to the plants on sale, I scrolled down to the bottom to learn more about the nursery. One screen lead to another and I eventually ended up on a page describing how to convert disturbed land into a prairie. It was a long article the length of it would normally send me in search of something fluffier to read. Instead, it held my attention and I read it in its entirety.

As I finished the article, my feelings of disorientation had passed. What I had been unable to define succinctly in my head of late was laid out in an orderly fashion in those paragraphs. All of my passions were pulled together into two words: ecosystem restoration. My love of the out of doors and animals, my work with wildlife rehabilitation and invasive species, the passionate conversations about land preservation that I had with Pat from the Keweenaw Land Trust; it all came together under the umbrella of ecosystem protection and restoration.

I’m a doer; just to sit here and say this is what I believe doesn’t cut it. But being an introvert, public advocacy makes me uncomfortable. Just writing this blog is pushing my comfort zone. Not to mention the problem I have with people who say one thing and then do something else (myself included). Words without action are just verbal noise.

With the coming of winter, I have many months to educate myself about ecosystems and how to restore damaged ones, develop projects to work on my own property next spring and find like-minded people to learn from and collaborate with. The ennui is gone, the passion returns.