UFO SAFE GARDENS
The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (6/19/10)

Reflecting the apocalyptic tenor of the times, Stephen Hawking, the British theoretical physicist, claims that space aliens someday might raid the earth for its resources. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” He could’ve sited the arrival of British Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico.

If we want to get ready for hostile space aliens, who according to Dr. Hawking’s 17th century Calvinism are as totally depraved as are we, then it behooves us to check out where they’ve landed before. Roswell, New Mexico, comes to mind where an unemployed ranch hand reported a sighting, or Phoenix, Arizona, where the witness was a scandal-haunted politician wanting to divert attention from himself. UFO landing fields have been dismal, either out in the middle of a desiccated nowhere or a smog-enshrouded urban bleak-scape. Indeed, some yards in Flagstaff are ripe for a UFO landing, bare, dusty, and scrubby, home to weeds and gravel.

I can’t recall a UFO sighting in such places as the famed Butchart Gardens in British Columbia, Canada, or any other places of beauty. Apparently, the best way to avoid a celestial Armageddon is to develop a beautiful garden. Space aliens don’t like beauty. As a side benefit, beautiful gardens will help prevent the eco-apocalypse predicted by horticultural doomsayers.

The first thing about a beautiful garden is design, and the first thing about design is tantalization. While there are straight lines in the creation, such as crystals, most are curved with a sense of wandering, like streams. Skyscrapers, flood control channels, and bowling alleys are all dreary straight lines. A curved line is far more beguiling, leading the eye around the next bend in the road.

The curved line is a symbol of potential power while the straight line is a symbol of power spent, just as a cocked arm is filled with potential power while the arm thrust is power spent, and, thus, impotent. In addition, to being far more attractive, the curved life is a symbol of potential power, the straight line being ho-hum and spent. There are no surprises in straight lines. They’re about as charming as a wagon rut. A meandering stream beckons the imagination.

If a garden is to offer relaxation and safety, it must tantalize the mind. There is not such thing as a relaxed boredom. Indeed, boredom is stressful and agitating and a prelude to the apocalypse because boredom promises no future, and a world without a future is an apocalypse. Life without mystery is life at an end.

A garden also is expression of life which is begotten in a fusion of water, soil, and sun. As Dr. Hocking suggests, the marauding space aliens are after resources, such as coal and oil, not life. Plunderers, like British Petroleum, are not creators.

The charm of a garden is in the textures and colors of plants and grasses, trees with various types of bark, shrubs with differing shapes, and flowers and leaves with appealing shapes and colors. In other words, the charm of a garden is random, verging on chaos, yet held together by a design rooted in mystery, the line leading the mind’s eye around the bend in the road.

A space alien bent on plunder wouldn’t look for mineral resources in a garden but for a bleak-scape of gravel and weeds or a desiccated no-man’s-land of asphalt and concrete. So, make a resolution when the spring thaw arrives to get out the shovel and turn some compost into the soil. Beat the Apocalypse and have a Happy New Year!

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010