Radical Acceptance in the Choir Loft and in the Creek Bed

In high school, my father was my choir master on Sunday mornings at the Kenyon College chapel.  He was a serious musician and serious church musician, conferring at length with the minister to choose music that supported the sermon and the liturgy in the ecclesiastical calendar.  He loved the traditional, conservative tunes (after all, he was a classically trained organist), but he also sought to bring the new in - from hippie students strumming guitars with modern folk or rock tunes, to dissident new classical work by music professors.  Everything was welcome.  Everything belonged. That went for his all-volunteer choir members as well.  

Many a choir master is outcome-oriented; wanting to praise God with only the most beautiful, very well-rehearsed sounds possible.  That requires selective service from his congregation - auditioning people, accepting some, not accepting others, even supplementing with singers outside the congregation if need be (lend me a tenor!).  And it required mandatory Thursday night choir practice.  If you didn't rehearse it, you can't sing it Sunday morning.  You don't belong with us.  That kind of choir master is focused on the audience's - the congregation's - experience.  The purpose of the choir is to produce something beautiful for everyone else to listen to.

My father was not that kind of choir master.  He practiced what he termed 'radical acceptance'.  Anyone was welcome to volunteer to sing in the choir.  You could show up at any time, and he'd do his best to accommodate you.  And we'd offer up to God and the congregation whatever we had to offer.  This was our offering to God, and we invited the congregation to listen in.  We weren't there to fulfill the congregation's beauty expectations.


I attended Dr. Kevin Anderson's Lunchtime Lectures this year with his take on Nature in the City.  I found his approach to how to view non-human life in urban areas to be deliberately provocative.  My deliberatively vague description is an attempt to convey his approach - one of, shall I say, 'radical acceptance'.  A re-imagining, a re-setting of our expectations and judgements about the natural world that interacts with our cities.  (And indeed, even seeing urban areas as part of the natural world, albeit a new and radically different part.) 

I find this approach to ultimately be a message of hope, of belongingness, of rightness.  I hear it saying "Let's look - let's just look - at the nature that is here in our city.  Let's describe what we see without judgement, without fear, without sadness, without beauty, without purpose." 

I've been spending time on the banks of Shoal Creek, and I thought I'd practice this approach, and spend the last warm sunny day before winter began just looking at the nature in the creek by the new (and awesome) Austin Public Library.  My goal was to simply assign a 'managed' or 'unmanaged' title to things I saw.  One could also say 'planned/unplanned' 'planted/volunteer' or 'intentional/unintentional'.  I was determined not to get angry at the trash in the river, or feel sorry for the creatures trying(!) to live there.  I let those trying judgments go, and simply looked.  Here's what I saw.

We are looking north up Shoal Creek from under the Cesar Chavez bridge.  The library is to our left, a bare rubble construction site on our right.  The new arched 2nd street bridge spans the creek. 

The constructed rock walls have plantings of mostly, if not all, natives.  The plantings shift from neat and formal garden arrangements on top, to more haphazard and 'natural' looking as they descend to the creek bed.  The creek bed then remains as it has been.  It's a flow from left to right and top to bottom of very managed, to looking like it's not managed, to unmanaged.  Note that many of the same kinds of plants which are planted in the rock wall are also growing in the unmanaged areas.

On the far bank, the plants are unmanaged, though the large liveoak is protected from the construction area with border fencing. 

There's another tree inside the construction area that's protected, though unintentionally so.  The electricity station for their construction needs is an island of life inside the fence.  Plants grow in every space possible under the electric boxes, and a tree has shot up.  No one's paying attention to it.  The liveoak, we know, we intend to keep safe and alive.  The electric tree and her entourage will not share that fate.  Same goes for the yellow flowers exploding just inside the construction fence.


It's common to see animals in the creek.  This afternoon, I saw a bird, looking like the first of three pieces of white trash, fishing the rapids, and a cormorant dive-fishing in one of the deeper pools.  I also saw turtles sunning themselves on a natural limestone ledge next to a concrete sewer entrance.  Hold up; that's not a natural limestone ledge - that's spread concrete.

The mix of managed and unmanaged was clear on the hillside beyond the rock walls.  The giant old pecan in the background now shares space with a newly-planted cypress tree (now brown till the Spring).

I tried not to feel or judge as I looked at this urban landscape.  To start - and end - with just looking at what is.  But it was awfully hard to not feel sad for the bird wading through trash to find a fish, all the while enduring the constant construction noise.  And not to judge the planting choices made, or rue the future demise of another lovely cypress tree that was obviously not in the 'right' place, or wonder why in the world no one had cut down an invasive non-native yet. 

It was freeing to simply look at all the life in front of me, living their afternoon in the city, in the glorious sun.  Everyone offering up to God what they had to offer.