Many years ago, a man set out on a journey on foot into the Alps. After hiking for three days through a region where ancient mountains thrust down into Provence, he found himself in a wasteland desolate beyond description. The landscape was bleak and monotonous, and nothing grew there but wild lavender. An abandoned village stood like a skeleton, its fountain dry. Life vanished. A fierce, insufferable wind growled through the ruins like a
disturbed beast. The rare inhabited villages of that region were hounded by even more beasts in the forms of rivalry, competition and resentment. The traveler was in search of water and after hours of seeing nothing, he spotted what appeared to be a tree stump in the distance. As he approached, he discovered it was a shepherd with his. Flock. The shepherd spoke little but offered water from his horde and
LED the traveller to his home. That evening, the 2 shared warm soup and sheltered from the howling wind in the sturdy stone house the shepherd had carefully restored from ruins. After dinner, the traveler watched as the shepherd meticulously sorted through acorns, selecting 100 perfect specimens before they retired for the night.
The next day, the traveler watched the shepherd carrying an iron rod and his carefully selected acorns, now soaking in water as he began making coals in the ground, dropping in acorns and filling them in, he was planting oak trees. Why are you doing this? The traveler asked. He learned that the man, Elzeyard Bouffier, had been planting trees for three years in this desolate country.
Having lost his wife and only son, he had withdrawn to the solitaire and seeing the land dying for lack of trees, he had resolved to remedy the situation. Yet out of 100,000 planted, he expected only 10,000 to survive. The traveler went away marveling at this strange man and his lonely quest. When the traveler returned years later after fighting in the First World War, the oak trees were 10 years old and taller than both men. The forest stretched for kilometers.
Most astonishing was the return of water streams flowing where they had been dry for generations. As water reappeared, so did other vegetation and a certain reason. After that, the traveler returned every year to visit his silent friend, and by his final visit in 1945, the transformation was complete. The abandoned village now thrived with inhabitants, gardens flourished, fountains flowed.
More than 10,000 people owed their happiness to the work of one humble shepherd who had planted trees for over 30 years. Welcome to the Imagination Redeemed podcast where we follow the great stories further up and further in In Pursuit of the Life of Christ. Welcome everyone. I'm Sarah Howell today joined by Matthew Clark, Amy Lee and our celebrity guest Amy's husband Young on Lee. And coincidentally, these three are also on the ANSEM Society's
board. We are at the end of our spring season exploring hope and despair. If you've listened to our last episode, then you've heard the story of Julian of Norwich's vision of the hazelnut and our conversation that explored hope in the face of suffering. This time we want to look more closely at what it means to practice acts of hope in our everyday lives. For great hope has come, and that's easy to say when it
finally does feel like spring. The sun is shining where I am, the dew is bringing life to the earth. New growth is teeming over. And we as the Church are in a season of Easter tide. Christ has risen, but in our story today, the resurrected valley of Province is that beautiful picture of abundant life we have in the resurrected Christ. However, before we speak to such things, I'm curious to hear y'all's thoughts on where the story begins. So let's start there.
What's so striking about this peculiar shepherd and what he decides to do in the place we find him? I want to look at the village first. Actually does the setting he that it the setting he's in and that village that's mostly deserted and really filled with strife. And I thought it was interesting that even though the story is going to be about trees and water, it's not that obvious that it's the lack of trees
that's causing this. So you can have goodness and hope with scarcity with without being rich. But somehow, as they been eroded by the harsh winds, like the environment, the villagers hope has been eroded the same way. The wind is the first thing that comes to mind from the story because it's the words that are given to it are not.
It's not a passive presence. It's something that's wild and brutal and growling and just being exposed to the elements like that with nothing as a buffer, no trees, it wears down. He he gives a picture of the villagers lives being worn down so that they don't have any inner resources, they don't have anything good to draw from. They don't have any inspiration or hope. And actually there's no seasons. There's no markers for the seasons there.
You know, it's just the wind day after day after day. And I thought it was interesting that they use a French phrase called the Scottish shower, which really threw me because I thought this is in Provence and what is this phrase? But apparently it means a rain that alternates between hot and cold, so it's the most unpleasant of wet conditions, and you're trapped in there together.
And when I think of depression and anxiety, I think of the inability to think that anything is going to change. And so they're all in this space where, as far as any of them can tell, life is just going to continue like this forever and ever and ever. And that just adds to the hopelessness and adds to the way that they're retaliating at each other in these conditions, I think.
We have a lot of trees, but when it's hot in Mississippi, the humidity, the air is so thick that it you, you can't get away from the heat. You can get away from the the sunlight, but it's, it's almost just as hot in the shade as it
is out of the shade. And I remember noticing that in Colorado, one of the last times I was out there because I was in the sun and I was hot and I stepped into the shade and I was like, oh, it actually is cool in the shade because the air is not carrying the heat because it's not as much as it is here. And I thought so the idea of not being able to, to get a break, have having no kind of intervals or and that makes me think of I've mentioned a guy name Jim Wilder a lot because I've been
reading in the last few years. But he was talking about that we learn to trust the people that recognize when we need to rest and they allow us to rest. And he's talking about child development and, and a baby will smile at you and then it will look away because it's, it's literally overwhelmed with the engagement. And some people will tickle a baby and prod at it because it feels good to be smiled at by a
baby. And actually, they're stressing the baby out because they're not giving it any intervals of rest. And the baby will become agitated and upset. And it's like a similar thing. Like we need rhythms of rest and engagement. But if you're in a habitat or an environment where you just cannot get a break, that will wear you out, You know, And our culture's, maybe there's some
parallels in our culture. Yeah, it seems like the wind is a beautiful image of that constant prodding that unsafe person or unsafe place or maybe our culture as that tireless wind. I can't help but think that the conditions for life require life here in this beginning part of the story and and your thoughts, Matthew changes my view of what the word life means then, because if life is required to give life, that's not a constant stream of activity or energy.
It it might actually be the the right balance between rest and action. Yosef Peeper talks a lot about leisure. That that we live in a culture of absolute work. We're sort of what we see ourselves as constituted by our utility and our accomplishment. And he says it's actually the other way around. What we're really made out of is these spans of, of a really kind of Sabbath, a Sabbath shaped span where we, we're beholding, we're not necessarily accomplishing anything.
We're just being relationally present, you might say, and attentive. We don't rest so that we can get more work done. We work so that we can stop working. And that's the thing that actually matters more. And that Sabbath is a day when you become useless on purpose, and you find out how beloved you are and how treasured you are. The way Aliziard approaches his work is is in this leisurely fashion, like he there's no
hurry in anything he does. When he's picking up the acorns, it describes how slowly he picks them out. Not that slow is the point, but you see, he has margin. He doesn't try to rush things, even though what he's really trying to do is a massive amount of work. In the time that this was written in the 1950s, I would think that this character should have like made a machine that plants 1000 trees every hour, right?
That's how that's how the story should have gone in in many ways, because that would be the more efficient, effective way of doing it. If he really has to plant trees, that's what he should be doing. Do you think that there's something inherent to the actual action, I guess, of planting trees that rebels against that idea of productivity?
I feel like there's something about the kind of person who plants trees, the kind of person who would be willing to plant trees has to be somebody who has a long vision and a love for green and growing things. Really. I was thinking about in The Lord of the Rings when Tribier just talking about Saruman, he says something like he has a mind of metal and wheels and he doesn't care for growing things except for except as far as they serve him in the moment.
And there's so much rending and tearing and harvesting and stripping and seizing that we can do on earth. And to put your mind to the work of cultivating requires, I think at least from this story, we see the long vision, the willingness to embrace loss along the way because he's losing, you know, thousands of saplings and acorns that don't make it to adulthood.
It's almost like you have to have a belief that it's not seizing but tending that's actually going to yield an abundance and a richness and life that actually lasts. I think it's also maybe why in the Bible we're very we're often compared to trees. Like we humans are supposed to be trees planted by streams of living water. It's a slow process. Trees are measured in years. They're not measured in minutes. They're not measured in seconds.
In this story as well, the progress isn't seen until the narrator comes back and visits 10 years later. And I think that's another beautiful thing is that not only is the work slow, but as Amy was saying, the vision of its outcome is also slow. Like it's, it's kind of like at home, we plant Tulip bulbs in the fall and you don't get to see anything until the spring in here in Colorado until it gets snowed over a few more times. But but that that's those.
I love how a lot of natural things are slow and a lot of the metals and gears things are the things that are fast. I saw a Chinese proverb today that said the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second best time is right now. And there's, it strikes me that there is an immediacy to planting trees as well. While it's slow, while your vision is long, you, you must begin now because it does take so much time and it is so important.
And so I wonder what makes us think that we can't be like this man who planted trees, What paralyzes us because maybe we haven't started 20 years ago, we dare not start now. Well, I'll confess, I think because I'm impatient, I'm not willing to plant an acorn and wait 10 years. I want my problem solved today. If I can use a credit card to
solve it, even better, you know? And I think it's also somewhat demoralizing when you can't see the results immediately of some fix you're trying to do. And it's also daunting. I, I don't know, I wonder how long it took for for this character to learn that he can do 100 acorns a day. And when you're doing the first one and you think in your head, I still have 99 to do, I think it feels daunting.
There's a lot of Matthew, when you like record songs and you know, you got like 20 more songs to record and you've just done the first pass of the first one. Like does it feel daunting to think like because you have the Longview, because you know how long it will take when authors write their first chapter, How this it does it feel that? I don't know.
But I think that is true that our incremental progress often feels unsatisfactory because we know, especially if we do have the long vision, that we've only done 10% of the work. I was having a conversation with somebody recently and they were talking about how in their marriage there had been a a season of depression and they got really overwhelmed and they were thinking about if this goes on for two more years, three more years, 5-6 more year. Like I can't survive.
He made the comment that he said I had to, I had to stop being somewhere I wasn't. I had to stop jumping ahead to six years from now and imagine he's like, because I, I have to be here and I have to go just one step at a time. And he's like, that was the only way to survive. And things did get better. And it didn't take six years. It took, you know, about a year. But he said, he said that kind of thinking ahead too much was that was, was really paralyzing.
And so I think, I think there's something like that. You mentioned creative processes like the current project that I'm on. I'm about to finish something that started in 2019. I think for me I have an an advantage because I I just don't naturally think that far. Like. I tend to be kind of an intuitive in the moment person for the most part. And so maybe that's not as hard for me as as a as it might be for some people. I think I'm reading the story a
little differently. When we think back to the villagers who are being buffeted by the the weather and the dryness and the paucity of the conditions, to me that reads as a situation of being without agency. You're kind of at the mercy of what is happening to you, and you no longer have any defenses or creativity to be able to fight back. And so when I think of the things that would stop me from being like Bouffier, I think of
weariness, actually. So sometimes just the lived experience of seeing things not make an impact or being bound by someone else's threats or wondering how anything good could come out of a dry wilderness. It's, those are the conditions that I think of. That's the mentality that I think of that I think prevents people a lot of times from being able to make headway.
Is that you're simply tired. In my 20s I think I had a lot more energy and that's a lot more belief that if I could just gain enough expertise to do something or enough training or gather enough people, then you could, you know, really forge ahead and make a difference. And I find that there is a difference 2 decades later now where I guess having seen a bit more and walked through not just my stories but other people's, there's less of a desire to go on a quest.
Sometimes it's more of a desire to just outlast the things that might be hard at the time. And it's the thing I've been underlining over and over again in Jeremiah. I've been reading that recently and in some other stories, just noting the places where people say their key desire is simply for peace and quiet. And I guess to quote Lord of the Rings again, good tilled earth. Just, you know, having a place where you can settle and be left in peace to eke out a, a
thriving, restful life. And so the other thing that stands out to me about El Zayard is that he's, he's not coming into it with the intention of planting a certain number of trees. So I think it's it's really significant to me that. As the narrator is talking to him, he's working from a place of loss. So he says that he moved there because first he lost his son and then he lost his wife, then he gave up his farm.
And I feel like in a position like that he's, I think actually the story says after that he thought well, might as well do this. So it's not like he's trying to meet a coat of trees. He's just working from a place of loss. And I feel like that makes a difference with the pace of your work because if you're starting from a place where one tree is better than none, 10 trees are better than none. It's not, I didn't, I have 90 trees left to go. It's more, well, let's see what
we can do in the next minute. And I feel like that is a pattern that I do see occurring over and over again. Maybe in the most inspirational lives that I've encountered is that they come to a place where they do hit rock bottom and there's nothing left. And then you do have a choice as to whether or not you're going to do something to build or you're going to do something to just let the elements keep
eroding you. Somebody reminded me of the pilgrims in book, the Elizabeth Gooch book this week. And I feel like there's a similar feeling like there's this group of people and everybody in some way has gotten to a place like that where everybody's kind of burnout. And but then there's this old building that's going to be, we're going to trim the hedges and we're going to clean up this
room. And we're going to, we're going to just start kind of doing those things because we have to make a choice to either just kind of lay down and die or, or do something. And, you know, and but it is a choice to, to just kind of put 1 foot in front of the other and just to stay engaged or to check out. And I've, I've definitely felt that maybe much more strongly at certain seasons of my life where I'm like, I, I just have to sort of just do this. I've got to get up and, like,
brush my teeth one more day. Yeah. I think we're already talking about the question, how can we be more like Elzayard Bouffier and how do I plant trees? But I wonder, Matthew, I think you might be getting there with the last thing you said. Let's start with how do I begin? You mentioned brushing your teeth. But you know, there's this tension I feel.
What's the difference between being paralyzed to an action because you were weary and also being at a place, maybe rock bottom like you said, Amy, that is there something that just gives us that that energy and force to just go and brush our teeth or what? What really does it mean to begin planting trees in our lives and in our own tireless winds that we face? I just want to be clear that I I
was joking about tooth brushing. I don't believe in tooth brushing at all and I don't think anybody should do it. I only brush my teeth when I have a tinfoil hat on. It's important. Of course it is. Yeah, You don't need to explain that. What was your question, Sarah? Sorry, how? Do we start? I think my question is, how do we begin to plant trees in our own lives? And maybe we need to define what planting trees really means. Like, let's get a little bit more practical with what that
could look like in our lives. Or what or maybe what it has looked like there are areas. I, I like where Amy was on the background of Elziard, right? He was broken and so he, he didn't start planting trees because he was rich and has had an abundance of trees already and had some extra to give. He came from, I don't have anything and I want to do
something. I remember hearing from a missionary couple saying that when they decided to become missionaries, it wasn't because they had everything figured out and they had all this like wisdom to give people. It was because they were being called to go. And, and so it, it's kind of that that is one of the things that I think a lot of people wait to be ready to start, whereas often you don't need to, you can just start.
I was talking to a friend this morning having breakfast, and he's a missionary in Central America. And he said he was in this little village. And he said the whole culture in this village was so different from places he had been before. And he said when he first got there, you know, there was a woman who he met. And she said, well, you need to come to our house and, and have lunch with us. And, you know, she didn't have a lot, but her posture in the world was I have enough to to
love another person, you know. And he said a lot of places he had gone before had learned if a new person comes to town, you go and see what you can get from them. But this woman who in the same sense as the tree planter, he was working out of a sort of, you could say that his circumstances were scarce, but his posture in the world was not. He was maybe working from a place of desolation, but the but his posture in the world was to to give and to plant, which seems like an impossible
combination. But you we've all seen that in people that we know when we've been invited in and loved or gifted. Right, I think the level of resources is actually almost irrelevant to the mindset. We've talked about this already, but the outcome of Boufier's work was not to wasn't going to be creating abundance within the margins of that day. Ten of his hundred seedlings might make it, and so he doesn't have much to offer. And even what he had to offer, most of it wasn't going to
survive. I think it was something that you said earlier, Sarah, again, going back to the the loss that Elsie Eard is working from, I'm wondering about that moment when we hit rock bottom and what is that thing that makes you think you can get up and plant a tree because there's lots of
circumstances. I think there are lots of things that we can do to metaphorically plant trees in our lives, but to get to a place where you feel like you've lost everything and maybe it's actually the virtue of actually having lost everything that helps you to see how much you had or didn't have to begin with and what really matters. But I want to say that when you come to a point in your life where it's hard to get out of bed, I don't want it to.
I don't want to say a cliche thing, but I think maybe the the only thing that meets us there is grace. That sometimes it comes in the form of a friend knocking on your door and saying, come on, let's get out of bed. Let's brush your teeth, let's get you a little breakfast and
going. Or or maybe it was a seed that was planted in you years earlier that so that when everything else is gone, everything else has eroded out of your life, there's still still some secret belief in you that there's one good thing that you can do that day or one life giving thing that might be worth more than just lying there and taking everything in and lying down in defeat.
I feel like that's a thing that we can't really skip over in this story, that this notion of, I mean, planting trees is really practicing resurrection, but that practicing resurrection comes about because of the story that's already set in the trenches of history that we are living right now that centers around incarnation and death and resurrection.
Really, the thing that we're doing when we're planting trees, really the thing that we're doing when we hit rock bottom, is living out of the grace that comes to meet us when we are in the desert. And we have been completely defeated and the queen has sent her prophets and we've, you know, we just want to lie down and die. And I can't think of anything else to explain those moments but that it's Grace. I really like that, Amy.
I think that's, I think that's accurate at least from every experience I've ever had and everything I've witnessed. You referenced practicing Resurrection, which comes from Wendell Berry's poem manifesto, The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. And even that title has a little bit of a rebellious spirit to it. And I love thinking about grace being intermingled with a little bit of rebellion, a little bit of defiance against what we see in this world. And that's how the poem starts, really.
You could think of the first stanza as him laying out the narrative of the Tireless Winds, where he talks about loving the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. And he talks about how if you let your mind follow that narrative and follow what's convenient to me right now, then they will tell you what to buy and they will tell you what to do. And your mind will just be a a punch in the card. But then his his defiance is, I think to what you're pointing to Amy.
It is to listen to a different narrative and he uses the phrase everyday do something that won't compute. He gives his own examples, but I'm curious to hear your eyes's thoughts on what does it mean to do things that won't compute within the lens of a narrative of grace. Well, and he even says love someone who does not deserve it. And it is a contradiction, right? You're having to say something against everything that's being said that I think going back to the sort of what looks like a
waste of energy and time. It feels like in all this noise and in all with all these voices and images, all this visual noise, auditory noise to kind of whisper like, oh, good grace. It kind of feels like, like it feels really wimpy and useless. And I was too looking recently at the idea of gift economy and that we're sort of representing this or bearing witness to an, embodying a, an, an outlandish economy and that the economy we live in for the, the market economy, words like grace and
mercy, they're nonsense words. They don't have, they're, they're not native to the vocabulary of, of a market economy. And so I was looking at Isaiah 55 and Isaiah 55 starts with like, come and buy you who have no money. It's like right off the bat you're like, no, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. How do you do that? And then it goes on and it says, come, and anyone who will turn from their ways will be freely forgiven. And you're like, now how does
that work? How do you do that? And then he says, because my ways are not your ways. He's like, look, I know this doesn't make any sense because I don't do things the way you do things. I wouldn't. I don't expect this to make sense to you because it contradicts everything that you've ever been told, all the diction you've absorbed about the way life is really is and the way the world is. And then he says, but even though my my ways are higher, my
thoughts are higher. I'm going to send snow and rain down to the earth and it's going to water the earth because my word is going to go out and something is going to flourish and bloom. In other words, I'm going to make the this weird way of life known to you and available to you so that you can learn how to live the way that I live my life, the way God lives his life. And he says and that will endow you with splendor. My people will be will become beautiful and that is what will
attract other people. And he says this will be for the Lord's everlasting renown. And like, all of that is about participating in a way, a gift economy that just doesn't make any sense. And so you, how can you not? How can you avoid feeling ridiculous? You know, I'm just going to plant these little acorns. It looks like it doesn't matter. And I'm going to whisper the word grace over every one of them.
And it sounds I feel like an idiot or I'm going to keep making these songs or writing these words or fixing these watches, you know? I like that it even in compute, if you ultimately think about it, none of us have the right formulas to use. If we computed things the way God thinks of it, it would probably work out normally, like correctly. But we're all using the formulas, like you said, of scarcity.
In fact, we were, I think it was this Sunday or maybe the Sunday before at church in the sermon, we were being told, like we often think of God's grace as being limited, as if if that person is loved by God, then I am not, you know, And it was in, Oh yeah, it was in the context of the prodigal son. If one of the brothers is love, the other one is not. If one son gets the inheritance, the other son does not.
But and that is what you would think, but that is not how God thinks of his gifts to us. It's not it's not that he will give some gifts to you and therefore I can't get any salvation is for all right. And I also love in this poem that it's everyday do something that won't compute because I think I think I can muster up enough faith and courage to do something that doesn't compute once in a while.
But to do it every day now does actually require you to adopt A different mindset, not simply, you know, wake up, wake up once in a while because he was planting trees every day. I think as much as he was changing the landscape, he was changing himself and something about himself. And in fact, when the, when the traveler visits him, he says, I, I'm, I'm getting peace just by being with him. And like, that is something that's transforming this person
and even visitors. That is the kind of thing that happens, I think when you do every, every day you do something that doesn't compute it. It changes what's around you, but it changes you as well. Yeah, a few years ago, I guess this was many years ago now, there was a, a book, I forget the full title, but it was about being a tiger mom. And somebody was writing about growing up in a Chinese American culture.
There was a response article written to it at some point by somebody who called herself a dragon mom who was the mother of a terminally ill toddler. He was not going to make it, I think, to the age of five. And she was contrasting her mode of parenting versus the tiger mom mode of parenting, which was very much, you know, go to your piano lessons, become a concert pianist and a lawyer and a doctor at the same time, you
know, that kind of mentality. And I remember, I think it struck me hard because our children were small around that time. But just that contrast between what the dragon mom was saying, she was saying, because I know that my child's life is so short, whatever he wants to do, it's a yes if it is humanly possible for me to do it. Let's go get cotton candy. Let's go play on the beach today. I want to make your life as full as I can possibly make it before you have to go.
And I was thinking about the way that I was parenting at the time, which was not to say yes every day because I had to think about, well, if I give you cotton candy today, things may not work out so well, so well for you as your body is developing. And I have to plan for, I can't see the end of my child's life. And so I have to plan for, let's plan on a regular life expectancy. And that changes my decisions from day-to-day. It changes when I'm going to say yes.
It changes, You know, it makes it necessary for me to say no sometimes when I want to say yes because I'm thinking with a long term view in mind. And that was a very good gateway for me to understand what God was doing with my life that I questioned the presence of suffering. I questioned it like a child who's going through just their day-to-day at the moment. Why can't I have this thing? It seems really good. It seems like it would be beneficial to my life and it would bring me joy.
But if my father is thinking not just on a three-year term or an 83 year term, but like a three millennia term and even farther, then the thing that is going to bear greatest fruit in my life might be the thing that is most hard for me to encounter right now. I mean, the thing that I have to learn to accept these days is that He's walking with me through it and that it makes all the difference.
But I think any, any endeavor toward a result that will outlast the current situation of suffering or pain is a work of planting trees. So parenting with that Longview or putting the work into rehabilitating souls. I mean, whether it's out of addiction and alcoholism or whether it's out of trauma, any investment that we make towards the health and the healing of a soul is worth it. It's it's every step and endeavor made towards that is saying something's going to last beyond this.
And I'm building towards that. And I feel like that's the kind of thing that Elzierd is doing here that gets the narrator's attention, that he's so steadily going about a work that it makes the narrator go, there's life beyond this life, there's life beyond our two lives because he's very conscious. I feel like in the story of war and the fact that this man could be dead by the next time he comes back to visit him, he's
very conscious of time passing. But underneath all of that, there's this undercurrent that this other man seems to be sure of, that there is life and work that goes on past the normal human lifespan and past our goals of whatever it is that we usually want to accomplish within our lives. So I feel like practicing beauty and resurrection and gardening, baking, the things that we laugh at, the things that make us feel
cheesy. But if it's done with that vision that sees beyond even the end of this life, even the end of this world, it makes sense. It gives it a framework for all of those small acts. All of those small acts can actually become very, very meaningful, very, very crucial, even, like Sarah was saying, because then it means that we ought to be doing it now, that there's no time.
That was too early to start in this work of healing and of practicing resurrection and giving life to others, giving your life away. And some of not, not some, I guess all of that is done without a promise of return. And that's OK. Meaning there is a promise of return in the sense of like what we expected eternity, but not necessarily that. Oh well, if I plant 100 trees, I can sell it or anything like that. So. We don't have to worry about that as we are doing these things.
In fact, it's kind of entertaining to me that like at least in the copy of the book I have, there's an afterword that talks about how the author didn't get, didn't make any money from the story and he was OK with that. As we do the things slowly in the ways that don't compute. Part of that also means even with an eternal benefit in mind there, there is no return. There is no you're not making money from it and that that is totally OK.
Again, back to the conversation I was having at breakfast. We were talking about time and this friend of mine loves to repair clocks and so he's thought a lot about time. He had a really interesting little it's. A dangerous hobby. I know, I know that, you know, but we, we were talking about time. And he said, you know, American culture grew up with, grew up kind of as timepieces were being developed and then you had train
systems. And so he said, as a culture, we're very, we, we tend to associate time with timepieces. We tend to think that time is what your clock says and is sort of determined by your timepieces, by your, your watches and clocks and all that, he said. But that's not actually what time is. This is, I think God's experience of time is, is relationality. And he he called it social time. And so he said, you know, in a Central American culture, they
didn't grow up that way. That culture wasn't developed alongside timepieces. And so you say like, let's meet and you say, well, when are when are we going to meet next week? Well, what day? And you say what day? And you say around midday and then you're not actually thinking about, OK, we have a certain amount of time for our meeting to take place. Time is just an opportunity for us to to be around each other for however much long, however
long. And so he even, he even said, you know that phrase in Scripture about to God, 1000 days, 1000 years is like a day and a day is like 1000 years. He said, I don't think that that's a sort of technical explanation of, of some sort of doctrinal situation that God has. He said, he said what I think that is made it's, it's more of a poetic point. It's saying that God is not in a hurry. He's got plenty of time and he takes his time.
And that he, he also made this point of saying that time can be moral in the sense of there comes a time when I should have done the thing that I was supposed to do and I didn't or I did. And it's not about your watch. It's about a relationship. In this relationship, I should have said something and I didn't say anything or I should have
checked on them or whatever. So I think there's a lot of confusion about what time is that comes back around to our discussion because we tend to look at our energy and our opportunities or our work and it gets so tied into the sort of mechanism of time rather than the sort of social aspect of time of the the relationality of time. And that means that if you know Amy and young one, I've been to your house and we've like accidentally talked till 2:00 in the morning. That's.
A terrible mistake. And the, you know, the, the first time that happened, I was like, oh, I'm bothering them. It's, it's, I'm taking too much of their, the mechanism of their time up. I'm watching the clock. And the second time that happened, I thought, I don't think that they're even thinking about that. I can feel that, that the mechanism is not being noticed and that time is becoming this sweet thing that we're just living in together. And it's actually about the, the
connection. And that was a real gift to me. And so I think sometimes when you think about is what I'm doing, which of those things is it fitting into the mechanism or the OR the relationality? That is another one of those things that we try to compute and it's better for us to stop computing it. Sometimes there is something I've been doing recently that really doesn't make any sense, but somehow it works out and hear it loud.
Let me explain. Sorry I'm going to drift into my life a little bit, but I've been and if you're watching on video, you can see I've been listening to records and C DS and I don't have time to sit down and listen to like a whole album. Nothing in my calendar says that I have time for that, but I've been making time for it and for some reason my life is slower now. Like really what I've done is taken my busy schedule and inserted an activity that takes
an hour. So what should happen is now my hair should be on fire and I should be running around trying to do something to make up for that hour. But quite the opposite has happened. I'm calmer now. I've been able to hear things in music that I've always ignored and I'm letting kind of I'm, I'm, I'm able to soak in that art and at the end of the day, I don't, I have not run out of time. I have not made my 24 hours, 25 hours either. It doesn't compute. But somehow by doing that, I
have more. I feel more time, even though I think by math formula I should really have less time. There's activities like that that really don't compute. But the more I do it, the more it benefits me and it seems to work out. I wonder if that's what loss can help us do. I think maybe loss brings us to the point where we see that the computation, the acquisition, the trading, the market based mentalities that we have are not
life. And I feel like maybe loss, which is death really in many senses is what sets us up to be able to actually practice resurrection. So I'll speed ahead because I was hoping we would get to talk
about the ending a little bit. My favorite part of this story is the end when the narrator talks about the effect of this man having planted these Groves of trees that grew into forests, that grew into localities that had water again, that could retain water and wildlife came back in and flowers and meadows
and all of that. I know that it was a common refrain when we were planning for this podcast or just planning for the stories that we would talk about that we kind of lamented that this wasn't a real story. But I've had the pleasure of diving a little bit into research on a man named Sebastio Salgado. I think in Brazil, he's actually like the real life counterpart
of the story. And as I was reading about what he did, so he, he and his wife together obviously with a team of people have ended up planting 3,000,000 trees in Brazil, 2 to 3,000,000 trees in Brazil. And the reason that they started was a very similar reason. He was a world famous photographer and he was known for, I think doing a lot of beautiful black and white photographs, but in very
conflict riddled regions. So it was after he covered the Rwandan genocide in the mid 1990s that his health suffered such a set back because of all the stress. Like it just destroyed his mind and his body. And it was really because he witnessed what men could do to each other, what mankind could do to itself, that he and his wife decided to move back to Brazil, which they had fled from years earlier and moved to Paris. And but they went back to Brazil.
He kind of inherited his parents's old farm, which in its heyday had been able to feed 30 families, but it gradually lost most of its vegetation, its ability to support life. The land dried out because of how they were, you know, stripping the land. And I think they they planted grasses from a different African grasses because they knew that they would grow faster to feed the cattle. But then the cattle kind of, you know, also contributed to the deterioration of the land anyway.
So what they inherit is about 1700 acres of dying land and they're in a similar place where he's, his health has eroded. I've used to erode a lot in this podcast, but his health is gone. And his wife turns to him and says, why don't we plant trees? And so they, they start planting these trees. And I love the detail that is given.
I don't know if anybody has the time to go look that up, but I highly encourage you to because just the process of what they learned, you know, they like Elsayer, they lost most of their or at least half of their saplings, I think in the first round because they they put them in too early or too late. The rain failed to arrive. And he says they had to learn the lesson that young trees don't stand much of a chance unless we subject them to some stress and strain before
planting. So they had to start thinking with the land and how to harden off these saplings, what kinds of saplings to plant. They went in batches.
So there was like actually a first round of trees that grew well that could then support the second group of trees that they were hoping to plant, that then 20 years later, they then could get to the work of planting trees that were going to outlast everybody that, you know, a lot of them will die off, but the ones that survive are going to survive for thousands of years. So as this is happening, I love this little bit.
I learned from this research that a tree can help retain 60% of the rainfall that comes just through what it soaks up. I love how enthusiastically Sarah is nodding right now that just the retention of the water meant that springs began to replenish themselves. There were ponds that were
retaining water. After a while, as these trees were growing and waterfalls were coming back, which meant that flowers and meadows could come back, the wildlife started moving back in. I think they said there's maybe 172 different species of birds now in that forest, a lot of which aren't in other places. And so it very much overlaps with the end of the man who planted trees where he's giving the image of, you know, not only are the trees growing, but the
water is coming back. And because the water is coming back, there are villages being set up and then young families are moving back in and now there are regional festivals. And I love that because it didn't stop for either story for the Salgado's or for what else they are did. It doesn't stop with just the water coming back either. There's art that comes out of that. You know, there's music and dancing that you can see in the animation. And for the Salgado's, he, he, I
love this. He planted these trees. He saw this change. And after a while he felt like taking photographs again. So then he went on like this three-year expedition, I think all over the world to look for places where man hadn't trampled his habitat to death. And he took these beautiful pictures of places where men and nature were still living in harmony. And I think they called it the Genesis Project. So just seeing this art flow out of that, like it gives life in
so many different ways. And it's the kind of life that we would never see if we sat down with a Ledger and a checkbook and said, how much can I eke out of the number of hours that I have in a day? So that to me was just it's, it's the beauty that we're working for. It's the beauty that that God promises in Jeremiah and I think that's maybe the most hope giving element for me out of this story. That's. So. Great.
I love that. I think a lot of our what Ansem does or promises is giving a place for people to share these kinds of stories that give hope. Like an having an example of both this story, the real life version of the story helps us to do the things that when we don't ourselves have the hope to do them. To do the one thing that doesn't compute today. To get up and brush our teeth today, it's helpful to know that there are stories.
These stories remind us, whether it's fictional or not, that yes, we are now inspired to do this thing today. I think it's one of the one of the core things that Anthem does is allow those stories to continue and keep going and ring forth. Well, in part of the idea of having a an imagination that is redeemed or redeeming people's imaginations, I think is it really helps me to think of the imagination as this kind of resource where you go to see what's possible to look for images.
And the way that imagination becomes resourced is by stories and other art in the lives of other people. So testimonies and the story of the scripture and all these things become images that are hung on the wall of the imagination. And you go into that room and you say, OK, what's possible and what could I do? What's something that's actually available? And he's like, well, there's some guy out there that planted trees. Well, so if somebody does that,
that's possible. That's a thing that maybe I could also do that. Yeah. I think we need stories of not just how things have turned out, but just ongoing stories. I mean, my mental images of just trying to furrow my own, you know, plot of land and maybe wanting to lie down in the dirt every now and again and give up.
But if you look to your right and your left and you see somebody plugging away faithfully at say, you know, a years long album and book project, or to walk downstairs and see my husband working on book binding and leather working, it's almost like having a visual cue to remember, oh, they're doing something and they seem to be doing it for a reason. So I guess I can get up and keep going to. I feel like that happens fairly
often. So being a community, I think adds that kind of reminder and motivation sometimes. It really does. Yeah, we need to. We need people walking with us. Yeah, Christ describes himself as the vine and his people as the branches, and I can't help but think about how trees create a place for water to reside.
And it's no surprise that Christ also calls himself the Living Water. And so, as we close, let's remember that at the beginning of our story, we met a man who nourished his acorns, his faithful little acts of hope in water, soaking them before he did the work of planting. As we go forth into our days, may we remember that the source of all life, the living water, nourishes us and begins the work of growth before we even do the planting.
Go in peace. The Imagination Redeemed podcast is a production of the Anselm Society. It's easy to see this world as disenchanted and to give up hope that there's more. But you were made to see the world with the eyes of heaven and to live a bountiful life that participates in the life of God, like in the great stories. To help make the show possible, go to anselmsociety.org/podcast 25. And make a donation.
The Anselm Society is a place where you can come in and experience that beauty, joyful celebration, and ancient wisdom and go out renewed, bringing that life to your vocation, home, and church. Learn more at anselmsociety.org and join us next time as we pursue a renaissance of the Christian imagination together.