Do you believe in miracles?
I do.
I see a miracle every time a bulb I planted in the fall, last year or many years ago, sends up shoots when the weather is still chilly and spring is only a promise.
I see it when the tiny seeds I planted turn into tiny, pale green leaves that grow into tender lettuce, or when the bell pepper plants that I started inside and grew too leggy finally take to their new home outdoors and grow strong, or when the tomato seedlings triple in size in less than a month and are blooming.
I know, strictly speaking, that plant growth is not a miracle, not an event that can’t be explained. Most middle school students understand how plants store energy in their seeds or bulbs, enough to put forth leaves and begin generating energy through photosynthesis.
What’s more, while the growth of plants on their own is a miracle, getting the plants you want to grow and bloom and produce fruit also takes some effort. It’s a miracle, but for gardeners who grow food or even favorite kinds of flowers, it’s a miracle in which humans cooperate.
There are a lot of miracles like that. Think of the increasing survival rates for childhood cancers. In the 1970s, fewer than 60% of children and fewer than 70% of adolescents with cancer survived for five years; now the five-year survival rate for children and adolescents of all ages with cancer is over 80%, according to the National Cancer Institute. The five-year survival rate for some of the most common childhood cancers — acute lymphoblastic leukemia and non-Hodgkins lymphoma — tops 90%.
None of that would have happened without the work of scientists and researchers, but to me, it’s still a miracle.
That’s the thing with miracles, whether it’s growing a healthy garden or allowing children with cancer to grow up. They don’t always happen on their own. We have a role to play.
One of the clearest examples to me is in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2015 book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” in which Kimmerer examines the intersection of her scientific work as a botanist and the way her Citizen Potawatomi Nation relates to the world around us. She discusses an experiment to encourage the growth of sweetgrass, a plant sacred to many indigenous people of North America.
What she and her students found was that sweetgrass left alone did not flourish as well as sweetgrass that was carefully harvested, leaving enough to keep propagating but making enough room for new growth.
It turned out that people were part of the plant’s ideal ecosystem, something that came as a surprise to young people who had no experience with growing plants and believed that humans only effect on the earth is negative.
The answer, it seems, is to learn as much as we can, and do as much as we can, to participate in the miracles that are happening around us.