What worlds might be created from disturbed places? Our lives can easily crack apart, a surprise fissure in life can cut right into our well-constructed plans. Most of the time such an interruption is not pleasant. Disruption is rarely welcomed. From a child screaming on an airplane, to local natural disasters, to global upheavals, to getting the call from your doctor saying, “It’s cancer.”
The Latin word ruderalis is where we get our modern word “rubble.” The ruderal plant grows in the disturbed areas, the waste ground, between the broken stone and rotting wood, even in the rubbish and refuse tossed out and forgotten. It does not require a trained botanist to spot life growing out of the waste places, an ecosystem disturbed and disrupted by man or nature. The gardener creates this marvel when she turns over the soil. We can spot the ruderal plant life in the fallow field and along the roadside.
We humans do not like any “disturbance in the force” of our personal lives. We want control; no surprises and minimized the risks. The need to “be prepared” like the good Boy and Girl Scout is strong within us. However, if you have lived on the planet long enough, then you know life rarely cooperates with our well-made designs. With a quick pivot, we do all we can to escape life’s dangers.
To avert disaster we keep to our safe routines: take those vitamins, say those prayers, mumble those mantras, do those good deeds to balance out the moral scales, but a fixed way of living makes the soul sluggish. It is deceptive to believe we can create a thriving life by recurring behaviors. By banal repetition we become the poorly created characters of our own stories, those characters who never change. When characters in a story fail to develop, the story collapses, it bores and quickly discarded.
Self-protection, never taking those leaps of faith for fear of what such disruptions might ensue, will never offer the opportunities to discover the ruderal life that can spring up when our ridged routines become broken and disturbed. A ruderal disruption springing out of the darker moments of life’s unexpected events only deepens the wonderful mystery of who we are as created beings in God’s image and who we might become. When we begin to understand that these moments of turmoil to the ecosystem of our soul can be a gift, then the story of our life is more meaningful and our living example to those around us becomes a gift.
