Serendipity?

There are many lessons in the garden; one is not to leave the wheelbarrow sitting where it can collect rainwater, you will only harvest mosquitoes! So as I was thinking “I need to bring my wheelbarrow up here” I rounded the storage shed and saw a wheel barrow! “I’ll use that” I thought, then realized it was full of water which made me full of anxiety! Sure I would find mosquito larvae wiggling about I peered in, wondering if I had the strength after a long day of gardening to dump out all that water. “But those are tadpoles!” It looked like 3 different stages of development were represented so more than one frog found our little metal wetland. Now instead of dumping it out I wonder every day “does the wheelbarrow need more water?”

Is this a chance to increase our vocabulary? Serendipity? Flabbergasted? Luck? Or learn about the web of interdependence, isn’t it great the tadpoles eat mosquito larvae? What is a larva (what are larvae) anyway? Sharpen powers of observation drawing the tadpoles? Write a poem? Research beneficials in the garden and decide if we want frogs? Have a philosophical debate about protecting the frogs versus letting nature take its course and if it rains they live if the wheelbarrow dries out they die, versus dumping the whole thing and using the wheelbarrow just because I need a wheel barrow! (eminent domain?)

Or simply take a breath smile and know biophilia is the real reason you garden even if you have never seen the word or heard of E.O. Wilson.

Maybe I’ll dig a little pond some day!

Most children have a bug period, and I never grew out of mine.
Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist

Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.
Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia, 1984, p. 22

I have argued in this book that we are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms. They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted, and they offer the challenge and freedom innately sought. To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained. I offer this as a formula of reenchantment to invigorate poetry and myth: mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions.
Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia, 1984, p. 139