Cutting Down the Bushes

© Sara Mackey

 July 4, 2004

           This story takes place in July two years ago. The heat was staggering that summer, came in waves and waves, and even in the early morning it could be oppressive. It was on one of those early July mornings that I took my tea out on the stoop, felt the brush of a thin branch against my arm, and said at last, “This is it. Today is the day that bush is coming down!”
          My house is rented, and the folks who lived there before me didn’t have much interest in yard work. I have no interest at all in yard work, and the result is that the bushes in front of my house were absolutely out of control. The one beside the stoop had grown taller than the roof line, with some of the branches draping over to grab at  me as I went in and out. The ones below the windows had grown up so far that you couldn’t see out any more. All together, those overgrown bushes made my house look kind of haunted. I had lived with the chaos, and disregard for ordinary yard work requirements, for four years, until that July morning…that day that finally, finally, the bush was going to come down.
          The task of cutting down the bushes turned into a summer-long marathon of struggle, frustration, and exhaustion. Because the Universe knows what it’s doing, that particular summer was also a time of seeking in my own UU congregation. We were, at that time, trying to pay careful attention to our identity, our mission, and our place in the larger community. Just as WUU is doing now. Here, we’re getting ready to call a settled minister. At my church, we had finished our building and were growing fast, and after years of looking inward, at ourselves and out own church’s needs, we were ready to start looking outward. There were many questions about our mission and our social action that we needed to ask, questions that we will be asking each other here as the search committee goes about its work. In my congregation, we were intentional about addressing those questions, just as we will be here at WUU. We organized and attended small group gatherings at UUCC all summer long. Talking. And talking.
          Now, don’t get me wrong. This process, for each of the congregations, was and is just that: a process. Please don’t think I’m bragging when I say we did it well at UU community Church, just as you will do it well here. But talking about social action, for example, is not the same as social action, just as worrying about what to do with the bushes is not the same as cutting down the bushes. What was it that made one specific hot July morning be the day that thinking about the bushes stopped, and chopping them down began? I don’t know. I only know that as the task took me over, it was impossible to overlook the lessons that the bushes taught me about the life of my church.
          Those bushes had been outrageous for a long time. I thought about them whenever I drove up to my house, for over a year. I wished for disposable income so I could hire somebody with skills and tools to come take care of them. I wished for skills and tools so I could take care of them myself. That became my permanent excuse: I don’t know what to do with them, don’t know how to do it, don’t have any tools to do it with. It’s beyond me; I can’t do anything about it. Then one hot July morning, for reasons I can’t explain and don’t know, things changed. Without skills, without tools, without knowledge, it was time to face the task.
          There’s a child I know, who comes to stay with me once in a while when her parents go out of town. She loves to make things out of stuff in my drawers and all over my desk. One time she made a card for her mother and asked me for an envelope for it. I didn’t have anything that fit, so I got a piece of colored paper and began to fold, adjust, eyeball it.
“Do you know how to make an envelope?” she asked me.
“That’s what this is going to be,” I told her. “It’s not white, but when I finish, it’s going to be an envelope.”
“No,” she said, “I mean, do you know how to make an envelope, or are you just making an envelope?” I didn’t know how to cut down the bushes. I just cut down the bushes.
          Here are some of the things I learned as I journeyed through this endeavor: without the correct tools, you use the wrong tools to cut down the bushes. Once the decision has been made that they’re coming down, you use whatever you have, including your hands. I had a small hand saw, and I was often in an awkward position, sticking my hands and arms in toward branches without actually being able to see what I was doing. I would saw and saw and saw and saw, thinking, “This is ridiculous. This little saw is never going to get through this branch. I’m wasting my time. I’m going to set this bush on fire.” And then, with no warning…zwoop. The branch was cut through. It amazed me that the first stroke of the saw, and the second to the last stroke of the saw, felt the same. There was no clue in the feel of the sawing that the very next stroke was going to be the last one.  Do we feel that way in our decision making sometimes? How many more meetings are we going to have? How many times do we need to go through this explanation? How many more discussions are we going to organize? And then, in one meeting, things begin to crystallize. But we don’t know in, let’s say, the fourth meeting, that the fifth meeting will be the one where everything comes together and we find our way to the next step on the path.
          Another thing I learned is that when you don’t have the right tools for the job, the right tools appear as you do the work. A neighbor offers a ladder. Another neighbor offers a large trash can so you can put the trash bag in and fill it more easily. One morning early I was up on the borrowed ladder, trying to figure out how to reach what I wanted to cut. I heard my name being shouted, and I looked across the street. My neighbor was out on her porch, waving a big cutter and hollering, “Get off that ladder! Get off that ladder!” I walked across the street, saying hi to her.
“I like to died when I looked out the window and saw you on that ladder!” she wailed. “You scared me to death! You made me come out on the porch in my nightgown!”
She insisted that I use her loppers, and said that when I fell off the ladder, nobody would see me lying on the ground in all the cut branches. I told her I’d yell if I fell off, and she said, “Who do you think is gonna hear you with all their windows shut and their air conditioners on!” My neighbor Joyce was confident that I was going to fall off the ladder, and when she drove to work a little later, she lowered her car window and shouted, “I’m going to work now. You behave yourself in those bushes!” I wonder sometimes if my neighbors peer out between the slats of their blinds and try to catch a glimpse of me involved in my sleazy, behind-the-bushes activities. But the point is, the most helpful tool that I had for cutting down the bushes was Joyce’s loppers, and that was a tool I didn’t own, didn’t know to ask for, didn’t know existed. But my neighbor knew, and saw me needing it, and gave it to me. When you make the decision to cut down the bushes, help will come to you, simply because you need help.
In the winter following that hot summer morning when she came out on the porch in her nightgown, my neighbor Joyce died unexpectedly. We were good neighbors, but not close friends, and I didn’t hear about her death for over a week. It was close to Christmas; she had a heart attack and did not survive. I had used Joyce’s loppers pretty energetically and had pulled one handle off several times. My plan was to keep them through the fall, using them as I needed them. Then I would buy her a new set of loppers the following spring, and deliver them to her along with a copy of this sermon. As I watched her children clean out her house following her death, I thought about returning the rusty, beat up loppers to them. But I didn’t; I kept them. I had become fond of them. They had theological implications for me, and they bear witness now to the fact that help comes when you need help.
          And speaking of help…as I removed those branches, bit by bit, I discovered several empty bird nests in the bushes. They were fascinating, sturdy, beautifully built, and they were evidence that life originated and flourished and went forth from the chaos of those untended, unruly bushes. My other part time job is with the Richmond Public Library system; during the school year I work in a library in a depressed section of the city. Sometimes my focus is too narrow; I see people in situations that I find unsettling or even awful and I feel the desire to plow forward and change everything. Oh, if only I could rearrange some of these lives until my version of “better” is created. It’s useful at such times to remember those bird nests, evidence of the fact that even though I did not want those bushes, even though I declared them a problem, life thrived and emerged from them. Without my help.
          Also without my help, weeds flourished. In fact, as I got more and more bushes cut down, I realized that some of what was growing in front of the house was not bushes at all, but weeds that had been growing there for so long that they had become bushes. Some had trunks thicker than my thumb, and twined around until they were keeping the other bushes…the real bushes…from thriving. How did that happen, I wondered? I recognized some of the weeds as the same plant that grew on the ground out back, spreading on runners around the back patio. It’s hard to imagine how they grew into bushes, how long that must have taken. These were plants that were not invited, not tended, not encouraged, and yet they grew into large, tenacious, powerful, foliage. How did that happen? It happened not because anybody ever helped them, but because nobody stopped them.
          We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. We believe in justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. We believe in the interdependent web of all existence. And that means we  Unitarian Universalists often struggle with the question of when to say STOP, or even if we should say stop. Several women were talking at a conference I attended some time ago; one was telling about a difficult person in a group she belonged to. “She eventually destroyed the group,” this woman said. Someone else at the table said, “I’d like you to say that another way. Say we let her destroy the group, because we didn’t stop her.” This is an unsettling question for me, and I don’t have any wise advice or any answers to offer. Only questions to ask, and I put this forward as a question: how do we tell the difference between exercising the right to entitled freedom, and doing harm? Is it OK to do harm while you are exercising your right to freedom? Who gets to decide if it’s harm? And how do we know when to say stop?
          Sometimes, knowing when to stop something is mercifully clear. In my back yard, in the far corner, there is a brush pile where I dragged some of the stuff I cut down. I would chop for a while, and then when I got tired, drag for a while. Chop and drag, chop and drag, all morning. Morning was the only time to work; the heat was too oppressive later in the day. When I began to get hot I would decide about breaks: I’ll drag this pile of stuff to the brush pile, and then I’ll sit down. I’ll saw one more branch off and then I’ll get some water. But there were moments when my flesh and bones, without any help from my intellect, made the decisions on the spot. My body would say right now, not in two more trips to the brush pile or two more strokes of the saw, but right now, it’s time to get in the shade. Or, this is the moment, not one minute from now, when it’s time to drink water.  What a relief to be reminded that you don’t have to know everything, don’t have to make all the decisions. Sometimes your body knows, even when your intellect thinks it’s in charge, and your body’s wisdom can be trusted. Once in a while, our intellects aren’t what we need to go by. When we’re doing the work of the church, or justice work, it’s not usually so clear, but there are times when our hearts and spirits know that we have to stop one thing, or start another.
          What I learned that summer about cutting down the bushes is this: it doesn’t take skills, it doesn’t take correct tools, it doesn’t take plans, it doesn’t take a vision of how it will look when it’s finished, although those things surely do help. But what it takes is the decision, and the declaration, that the bushes are coming down. Everything else flows from that declaration. The flow is not smooth; it is not gentle and soothing. Transformation is difficult. It makes us exhausted, frustrated and disheartened at times. It’s grisly, breathtaking, painful, exhilarating, and surprising. It’s beautiful, dirty, stunning, and heartbreaking. And transformation is worth everything that it costs us.

And so may it be.