In March, Prairiewoods staff wrote a response plan that envisioned the need to respond to varying stages of how the coronavirus pandemic might manifest locally. We have done our best to be responsive and responsible in decision-making about how available Prairiewoods is to guests and visitors—and to safeguard the health of all our staff. While Iowa has been considered a national “red zone” for a while, recent spikes in infections, test positivity rates, and hospitalizations lead us to the difficult decision to close the Center and return to Phase I of our plan.
Yesterday, I had a text conversation with a friend, a parent of school-aged children. She said she was watching school closing due to COVID and feeling useless. I responded that I understood that feeling. As Director at Prairiewoods, throughout 2020 I have often felt both responsible and ineffectual. And yet, I know I—like each of you—can only do my best to respond to something we have not experienced before.
Still, there are things to celebrate! We are happy to announce that visitors are welcome on both the prairie and the woodland paths at Prairiewoods! Much work has been done since the Aug. 10 derecho to make these spaces safe. We know that nature offers immense healing in these difficult times and are so grateful to be able to open this space to you. The land at Prairiewoods looks very different. But I offer these words of perspective from August Stolba, land care and holistic ecology coordinator:
“The canopy has opened; stumps are everywhere, piles of debris too, you can see the road and sky where you couldn’t before. Noticing this deeper perspective you begin to see through the land like never before. The new line of sight means new rays of light. We will grow a denser and more diverse understory, tree crowns will be less crowded allowing spindly trees to put energy into their trunks, the old stumps and branches will break down into nutrient-rich spongy soil and nurture all of this new growth.”
The work continues. This is true for the land at Prairiewoods, just as it is true in so many areas of our lives—especially in this time in which we find ourselves living. In the spirit of evolutionary consciousness and the #PanDeepening theme of this daily blog, I offer the following prayer/poem from the Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teillhard de Chardin. We are quite naturally impatient, but hopefully we are learning to trust the slow process of becoming who we are meant to be.
“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”―Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
—Jenifer Hanson, Prairiewoods director