Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Ecojustice

  • Gardens, not Walls

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Reading

    The reading was the poem “Set the Garden on Fire” by Chen Chen. (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)

    Homily for the annual Water Ritual

    Every year, when we have this water ritual, we talk about how we are all connected. Or more precisely, how all human beings are connected to each other, and how all human beings are connected with all other living beings and indeed with the non-human world as well. We are literally, physically connected by the water cycle (as Kate and I pointed out during the moment for all ages), and we are also connected by ethical concerns, concerns that may not be physical but are just as literal as the water cycle.

    In the first reading, we heard a poem by Chen Chen, a now-middle-aged poet who was born in China and grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. This is a poem about a suburban community. It could be a poem about Newton, or it could equally well be a poem about Concord, Massachusetts, where I lived and worked for the first forty years of my life, or it could just as well be a poem about Cohasset or Scituate or any South Shore suburban community. Here in the suburbs, we are both good at nurturing human community, and we are bad at nurturing human community.

    We are good at nurturing human community when we keep our communities safe so that we don’t have to fear interactions with strangers. We are good at nurturing human community when we support local organizations like parent-teacher groups, and elder affairs councils, and congregations, and scouting groups, and community aid groups like food pantries and the Cohasset Community Assistance Fund, and so on. Indeed, many of us move to the suburbs precisely because we think it will be easier to be part of human community here.

    On the other hand, suburbs can also be places that are actually destructive of human community. I’ll tell you a couple of stories to show what I mean, both taken from my home town of Concord. First story: A friend of mine had a new family move in next door, and when she saw her new neighbor getting his mail at the mailbox, she ventured to go up and say hello. He retrieved his mail from the mailbox, and then said into the air — not looking at her — “One of the things that I like about the suburbs is that you don’t have to talk to people.” Second story: When I was in my thirties, I was talking with an older friend about an affordable housing project that the town proposed building near her house. She was vehemently opposed, because, she said, “Black people might move in.” (She was so vehement I decided not to tell her that it was much more likely that I’d move in, because as a current town resident in the right income bracket, I’d get preference.) From these two stories, you can see that sometimes people in suburban towns do not nurture human connections.

    Of course this is true of people everywhere, not just in the suburbs. In the current political environment, we have two political parties whose primary vision for the future seems to be the eradication of the other political party. I have friends who are Democrats who seem to mostly want to talk about how much they hate Trump, and I have friends who are Republicans who seem to mostly want to talk about how much they hate liberals. Neither party are exemplars of nurturing human connection. Similarly, in the current ethical environment, too many of our thought leaders are people like the former CEO of Steward Health Care, who received hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, while at the same time the hospital chain didn’t have enough money to pay for critical supplies, or to pay staff salaries. Again, this man is not an exemplar of nurturing human connection.

    I’m reminded of a story in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sabbath 31a. A man approached the famous Rabbi Hillel. “I would like to convert to Judaism and become a Jew,” he said. “I know I have to learn the Torah, but I’m a busy man. You must teach me the Torah while I stand on one foot.”

    “Certainly,” said Rabbi Hillel. “Stand on one foot.”

    The man balanced on one foot.

    “Repeat after me,” said Rabbi Hillel. “What is hateful to you, don’t do that to someone else.”

    The man repeated after Rabbi Hillel, “What is hateful to me, I won’t do that to someone else.”

    “That is the whole law,” said Rabbi Hillel. “All the rest of the Torah, all the rest of the oral teaching, is there to help explain this simple law. Now, go and learn it so it is a part of you.”

    Of course we all know that we shouldn’t do to someone else what is hateful to ourselves; as another rabbi put it, we all know that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. But notice that Rabbi Hillel adds the instruction: “That is the entire Torah, the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” (1) When Rabbi Hillel tells the man to go and study, he’s not talking about some academic kind of study; he’s talking about study as a sacred act; he’s talking about knowing something so well that it becomes a central part of who you are. An implicit part of this kind of study is that it must happen in community. This isn’t the kind of studying where you sit down alone somewhere and memorize a bunch of stuff. This is the kind of study where you engage with the biggest possible moral and ethical questions by talking and arguing with other people. Indeed, I’d argue that serious moral and ethical study can only be done in community, can only be done with other people.

    Actually, this is more or less what we do here each week on Sunday morning. Unlike some Christian traditions where the minister’s job is to preach from on high, telling the congregation what is right and what is wrong, our tradition is supposed to engender argument. (At least, that’s what I’d say, though it’s open to argument.) I would say that in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, oftentimes the role of the preacher is merely to articulate a problem or concern currently facing the congregational community, and to propose a preliminary resolution of that problem or concern. Then it is up to the members of the congregation to further think about and discuss the problem or concern, and to decide for themselves how this might affect their own lives.

    And when the preacher is wrong or inaccurate, it’s up to the elders of a Unitarian Universalist congregation to let the preacher know. When I was the minister at the New Bedford Unitarian church, Everett Hoagland, a poet and college professor, used to sit in the back pew in the center, and listen carefully to what I said in the sermon. He would tell me when something I said seemed particularly accurate or true; and when I got something wrong, he’d gently tell me where I went wrong. In that same congregation, Ken Peirce, a retired schoolteacher, sat in the center about a third of the way back. He would take notes during the sermon, and after the service hand me the notes as he greeted me on his way to social hour. His notes would often prompt a follow-up sermon.

    Now, not everyone is a college professor or retired schoolteacher. Most people are not going to take notes during a sermon and correct errors the way Ken and Everett did. I remember the old Universalist in one congregation who worked as the butcher at a local supermarket. What she wanted from a Sunday service, she said, was something to think about while she was at work during the week, something to turn over in her mind, something that might help her to live her life better. Or I think about Gladys, who was dying of cancer when I knew her; she had little interest in intellectual exercises, but she was facing the biggest possible human questions about life and death and mortality, and she came each Sunday to be part of a community where it normal and acceptable to talk about such big issues. Or I think about Nancy, who was in her seventies and homeless when I knew her; she came to Sunday services to have a time when she could think about something more than basic survival.

    To my mind, these people exemplify, each in their own way, what Rabbi Hillel meant when he said, “That is the entire Torah, the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” None of these people was Jewish, none of them read the actual Torah; but each of them, in their own way studied what it mean to be part of a community and a tradition that dealt with the highest moral and ethical and religious questions. For some of these people, study took the form of notes and verbal discussions. For others, study too the form of mulling over thoughts and ideas that might help one to lead a better life. Still others were confronting pressing questions of survival and life and death, and they needed a community where they could confront those questions openly and without shame.

    Because of this, I sometimes think the most important part of our Sunday services is social hour. That’s when you get a chance to have conversations with other people about life’s big issues. In our tradition, those conversations might not take the form of formal religious and theological discussion and argument; instead, those conversations are more likely to take the form of conversations about life and job and volunteer commitments and political actions and of course family (which includes both biological family and chosen family). Rabbi Hillel said that studying Torah was important, not for the sake of abstract religious and theological arguments, but rather for the sake of determining how to live by the dictum: “That which is hateful to you do not do to another.” For Rabbi Hillel, study was not merely an academic matter, but a matter of the highest ethical values and concerns; study was not something you do in your head, study is something that affects your entire life.

    Socrates said something similar when he was facing the death penalty. According to Plato, Socrates told his accusers, “I say again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of [humanity], and that the unexamined life is not worth living.” (2) This, too, is what it means to study. To talk about virtue and other big questions is to lead a life that is well worth living.

    And now let me return to the suburbs, and to the poem by Chen Chen. In the poem, a Chinese family buys a house in the suburbs. At this point, the people living in the house next door have a couple of options. On the one hand, they could get to know this new family (and if they felt some resistance to getting to know the new family, they’d engage in a little self-examination to figure out why). On the other hand, they could plant a hedge of rose bushes, and begin to whisper rumors of drub money and illegals and so on. In the poem, the neighbors choose the second option. And in response, the poet says:

    “Friend, let’s really move in, let’s
    plunge our hands into the soil.
    Plant cilantro & strong tomatoes,
    watermelon & honey-hearted cantaloupe,
    good things, sweeter than any rose.
    Let’s build the community garden
    that never was. Let’s call the neighbors
    out, call for an orchard, not a wall.
    Trees with arms free, flaming
    into apple, peach, pear — every imaginable,
    edible fire.” (3)

    While the poet doesn’t talk about Torah study, I think he’s saying much the same thing as Rabbi Hillel. Both of them are teaching us the importance of nurturing human community. Whether you choose to use the metaphor of study, as Rabbi Hillel did; or the metaphor of discourse and conversation, as Socrates did; or the metaphor of planting a community garden, as Chen Chen does — the end result is the same. All these are ways of learning how to embody the dictum “That which is hateful to you do not do to another.” At the same time, all these are ways of learning how to embody the dictum “that the unexamined life is not worth living.” And finally, all these are ways to call for an orchard, rather than a wall; to nurture human community, and further to nurture human community that is also a part of a community of all living beings.

    So those are the kinds of things that arise for me when I consider the imagery of the annual water ritual; that’s what arises for me when I ask myself how it is that all of us human beings are interconnected, and how it is that all human beings are connected with the rest of the universe. This is not to say that what comes up for me is any better than what comes up for you; you and I are both fallible beings, and it is only by talking together that we have a hope of coming closer to the ultimate truth.

    Notes

    (1) The William Davidson Talmud (Koren-Steinsaltz), www.sefaria.org/Shabbat.31a
    (2) Plato, The Apology, 38a; trans. Benjamin Jowett.
    (3) Chen Chen, “Set the Garden on Fire,” Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, ed. Melissa Tuckey (Univ of Georgia Press, 2018).

  • Ecospirituality

    Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

    Readings

    The first reading is an excerpt from Wangari Maathai’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

    “I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents.

    “Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.”

    The second reading is from the book Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey:

    “Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — …a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves,… and I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by computers. I promise you this: you will outlive them.”

    Sermon: “Ecospirituality”

    Many years ago the author E. B. White said, “I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” (1)

    To save the world, or to savor the world: this dilemma arises almost immediately when we begin to talk about ecospirituality. We all know we’re in the middle of a major environmental crisis, one that needs immediate attention. We could easily spend all our free time trying to solve Earth’s ecological problems. Of course if we spend all our free time solving those problems, then we don’t have any time to enjoy the environment that we’re trying to save. It can feel as though this the price we have to pay: There’s too much to be done, so there’s no time for enjoyment. On the other hand, it can feel as though our environmental crisis has arisen because we all spend too much time trying to work harder, trying to be more efficient and more useful, trying to do more and more. From a spiritual point of view, maybe we should try to do less. Maybe we should spend less time doing, and more time being. Maybe our drive to do more is much the same thing as the drive to consume more, and the drive to consume more is what’s driving the ecological crisis.

    Do we save or savor the world? I’d like to suggest one way we might thread our way through this ecospiritual dilemma. But first I have to outline the ecological problems facing us. It’s going to be a bit unpleasant, a little bit depressing, but then I can move on and talk about savoring the world.

    Like most big problems, the ecological crisis can be broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces. Many years ago, the biologist E. O. Wilson broke down the environmental crisis into five categories: habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, human population, and overharvesting; he used the acronym HIPPO as a way to remember his formulation.(2) But given how much we now talk about climate change, Wilson’s list can feel a bit outdated.

    Three or four years ago, I attended an online talk given by Stuart Weiss, a Stanford-trained biologist who works in environmental remediation. There are five items on Weiss’s more up-to-date list: climate change; land use change (which includes deforestation and “defaunation” or the decline of animal populations); invasive organisms; toxication (which includes pollution from solid waste like plastics); and human overpopulation.

    That’s a rather daunting list, and even though climate change gets the most attention in public conversations some of the other problems can be equally pressing, or even more pressing. For example, communities that suddenly discover their water supply is contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are going to place a higher priority on addressing toxication. Or if you go for a walk in Wompatuck State Park and notice how many the beech trees are dying because they’re infected with invasive Beech Leaf Disease, in that moment you might feel as though invasive species represent a more immediate problem than climate change.

    Each of these five major problems can feel overwhelming. How can we possibly stop climate change? How can we prevent deforestation and defaunation? What can we do to tackle invasive species? And what about toxication and human overpopulation? The overwhelming nature of each of these problems, and the even greater sense of being overwhelmed by considering all these problems at the same time, leads me to the first great principle of ecospirituality: You do not want to feel overwhelmed. Because when you get overwhelmed you can neither save the world nor savor it.

    This in turn leads to the first great principle of ecospiritual practice: You are just one person, so you only have to work one of these five big ecological problems. And you only have to find one narrow, manageable aspect of that problem where you personally can make a difference given your skills and abilities. Or you may not find one specific aspect of an ecological problem, it may have already found you. I’ll give you an example from my own life. I’ve been teaching and supervising comprehensive sexuality education programs to adolescents for a couple of decades now. I’ve developed some skill in this area, and teaching about human sexuality seems to be a good match for my abilities. When I happened to read that education seems to correlate with lower birth rates, it finally dawned on me that teaching comprehensive sexuality programs is how I’ve been using my skills and abilities to address human overpopulation.

    Furthermore — and this seems odd when I put it this way — for me, teaching about human sexuality is actually a kind of ecospiritual practice. It turns out that doing something to save the world can serve as one kind of spiritual practice. We tend to assume that spiritual practices are things like meditating or doing yoga or studying Torah or attending Dharma talks. But if the effect of a spiritual practice is to make us feel more centered, more grounded, more spiritually whole — then for some of us, engaging in concrete action to help save the world is going to be more effective than prayer or sitting zazen. Using my own experience as an example, in my case addressing human overpopulation by teaching human sexuality makes me feel more centered and grounded. I feel like I’m doing something to make the world a better place. That makes me feel good. It also makes me feel less powerless in the face of ecological problems, so I feel more grounded.

    I’m not saying anything you don’t already know. I’m sure many of you have similar kinds of stories that you could tell about yourself. The only thing I’m saying that might be a little different is I’m claiming that you only have to pick one of the big environmental issues to address; and then you only have to find one aspect of it where you can bring your talents and abilities and skills to bear. You don’t have to do everything; you only have to do one thing. If you get really good at that one thing, then you can add more to what you’re working on. But from an ecospiritual point of view, you don’t want to take on too many things. If you take on too many things, you will dilute your efforts and become ineffective, and you may burn yourself out. But if you do that one thing which you are able to do, if you can use your individual skills and talents to address environmental problems, you can experience personal spiritual growth while you help save the world.

    Now that we’ve talked about saving the world, let’s turn to savoring the world, for that is the other half of ecospirituality.

    In the second reading this morning, Edward Abbey exhorted us to be “half-hearted fanatics” when it comes to saving the world.(3) He is implying that we should spend no more than half our free time saving the world. The rest of our time, he says, we should spend savoring the natural world.

    I agree with Edward Abbey on the necessity of getting out and savoring the world. I don’t find myself in agreement with the list of activities he tells me I should enjoy: “hunt and fish and … ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers,” and so on. That may how Edward Abbey savored the world, but that need not be how you or I savor the world. I’ll give you some examples of other ways to savor the world that are perhaps less infected with machismo.

    First example: this summer I went to a weeklong workshop to learn about bryophytes, that is, mosses and related plants. Our instructor told us that one of the reasons he studied mosses was because of their aesthetic value. And he took obvious pleasure in getting out into the field to collect mosses. He got just as much joy from being in the lab, looking at mosses under the dissecting microscope or looking at slides of parts of mosses under the compound microscope. I would describe the joy he got from looking at mosses under a microscope as a kind of spiritual experience.

    Second example: I know people, and you all probably know people, for whom gardening provides a kind of spiritual experience. Preparing the soil, planting seeds and nurturing young plants, keeping the rabbits and the plant-eating insects from doing too much damage, watering, hoeing, harvesting — the whole process of gardening from start to finish can serve as a kind of spiritual experience. My father was one of those gardeners. In spring, summer, and fall, he seemed to feel a deep need to spend every spare moment working in his garden. One of the last things he did before he was no longer able to walk was go out and check on some pea plants that were still growing in his garden, even though it was November.

    Third example: Henry David Thoreau wrote extensively about going for long walks, and the things he saw on his walks. One of Thoreau’s most famous essays is titled “Walking,” and in that essay he claims the people with a real genius for walking actually engage in “sauntering,” a word he says derives from the “idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages … under the pretext of going à la Saint-terre, to the Holy Land.” “Saint-terre” became “saunter,” and the people walking were saunterers.(4) This was how Thoreau humorously justified his long walks: when his more straitlaced neighbors accused him of being a mere idler who walked in the woods to avoid work, he called himself a saunterer, a person engaged in a religious journey, someone who could find the Holy wherever he walked.

    Thoreau’s conception of walking as a spiritual practice has become an accepted part of our culture. When we think of things that constitute ecospiritual practice, we are most likely to think of something like Thoreauvian walks in the woods. By extension, it’s not too much of a stretch for us to think of activities like climbing mountains and running rapids in a canoe as possible spiritual practices; these, too, are forms of sauntering.

    But I’d like to broaden the understanding of ecospiritual practices. Earlier, I said that teaching a class in comprehensive human sexuality to adolescents was a kind of ecospiritual practice for me. Now let’s broaden the definition of ecospiritual practice even further. I want to broaden the definition of ecospiritual practice enough to include science. For a trained scientist like my moss instructor this summer, looking at moss under a microscope can be a spiritual experience. Doing work in the biological or ecological sciences can lead to spiritual experiences for some people. For these people, science can even become a kind of spiritual practice. Even for people who aren’t trained scientists but who seriously try to learn about biological and ecological sciences, both amateur science and citizen science can become a kind of spiritual experience.

    Including science broadens the definition of ecospiritual practice beyond what our society usually allows. Our society usually assumes that science and religion are completely incompatible. But some of the scientists I’ve known have been very spiritual people; perhaps they wanted nothing to do with traditional religion, but they were spiritual. Anything that brings us into a greater awareness of the wider ecosystem, the wider universe, can result in a spiritual experience.

    I find it difficult to name that wider awareness, to come up with a term for that transcendent feeling. Traditional words for this feeling include God, Dharma, Brahman; but to my ears, in contemporary American idiom none of these words can quite convey exactly what I mean by a transcendent feeling. Ralph Waldo Emerson described the feeling of transcendence by saying: “all mean egotism vanishes; I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.”(5) I like this formulation better, even though the image of a transparent eyeball is grotesque. But Emerson gets at the experience of what can happen when engaging in ecospiritual practices: your sense of self can disappear, leaving you with a simple awareness of oneness with the rest of the ecosystem.

    I may not like the image of the “transparent eyeball” — and even in his own day, people made fun of Emerson for using that image — but I have nothing better to offer. Personally, I prefer to talk about the interdependent web of existence, but that phrase doesn’t really describe that feeling where you lose your self and feel a part of a greater whole. How do you describe it when a scientist loses themself for an hour looking at a specimen of Ulota crispa complex through a microscope? How do you describe it when you’re working in your garden, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been so immersed in the life of plants that you lost track of an hour or more? In that hour, all mean egotism vanished. In that hour, the currents of Universal Being circulated through you. Even when I’m teaching a course in comprehensive human sexuality, I’ve had times when all my mean egotism vanished.

    Maybe there are no words to talk about this. We get to a certain point, and words fail us. We know what the ecological problems are; words are adequate to talk about the ongoing environmental crisis. Words begin to fail when we want to talk about experiences of the interdependent web of life. My moss instructor could tell us that looking at moss was beautiful, but the expression on his face and the posture of his body said that there what was going on inside him was more than simple appreciation of a pretty plant.

    Words may fail, but when we can talk to someone face to face, most of what is communicated happens without words. That’s why we come here on Sunday mornings — you may listen to my inadequate words, but more importantly there is communication that happens just by being together. So it is that the best way to learn about ecospirituality is to have it come up in casual conversation with another person. Look at the eyes of the gardener when they tell you about putting the garden to bed for the season. Listen to the tone of voice of the hiker when they tell you about climbing Mount Garfield in the White Mountains. Observe the body language of the person telling you about their environmental project. Because words are inadequate, this may be the only way to discover what ecospirituality is: being with people who are doing ecospirituality in their day-to-day lives, even if they don’t call it by that name.

    Notes

    (1) Quoted in “E. B. White: Notes and Comment by Author”, Israel Shenker, The New York Times, 11 July 1969.
    (2) See for example his lecture on 18 March 2011 at the Smithsonian Museum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6-cIBuzjag
    (3) Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire.
    (4) Henry David Thoreau, “Walking.”
    (5) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.”

  • Looking at Flowers

    A “moment for all ages” at First Parish in Cohasset, (c) 2023 Dan Harper. I didn’t follow this text exactly, but it will give you the general idea.

    Moment for all ages: “Looking at Flowers”

    The children and youth may come forward now if you wish, and if you brought a flower today, bring it along.

    If you brought a flower to share, you can put it in one of the vases on the table. (And if you didn’t bring a flower, here are some extras so you can have one to put in a vase.) The adults are going to do this, too. You people get to go first because you’ll want your hands free so I can give you another flower. You’ll see why you want a different flower in just a moment.

    [Hand out flowers that can be dissected]

    Often we look at a flower and say, Wow, isn’t that pretty. The color or the shape of the flower catches our eyes, or maybe we admire the scent. Well, I’m going to try to convince you that a flower is a whole lot more than that.

    Look closely at the flower I handed you. Now look at the diagram I gave you, and see if you can find the different parts of the flower.

    Let’s start with the petals and sepals. See those?

    Now let’s look at the tiny parts of the flower. Use a magnifying glass if you want. The pistil is in the middle, and it’s made up of the style and the stigma. The stamens are around the center, and they’re made up of anthers, which are held up by filaments. That structure down at the bottom is the ovary. If you want to, you can take off some of the petals so you can see the inside better (this is why I gave you these flowers, so you can pull them apart).

    The stamens produce pollen. The pistil takes the pollen that the stamens produce, and send it down to the ovary. The ovary is the part that turns into a seed.

    So how does the pollen get from the pistil to the stamen? Depending on the flower, the pollen can be transferred by an insect such as a bee; or a bird or a bat or another animal; or sometimes by wind or water.

    When an insect like a honey bee or a bumble bee comes to a flower, they are not looking for pollen. They are looking for nectar. Usually the flower stores the nectar deep inside the flower, at the base of the ovary. That way, the insect has to crawl all the way into the flower to get the nectar reward, which makes it more likely to get pollen on it. So the bee gets the nectar reward, and in return the bee helps the flower get pollinated. Look at your flower and imagine how a bee would spread the pollen around while getting its nectar reward.

    If you get a chance, try sitting outside and watching a flower to see what insects come visit it. (If you stand a couple of feet away from the flower, and don’t make any sudden moves, the bees won’t sting you; they’re too busy getting nectar.) There are dozens of different kinds of bees: from bumble bees, which are pretty big, to tiny little sweat bees that are bright green in color. When you look closely, each flower is like a miniature world.

    But what’s really fascinating is that bees need flowers so they can make honey from the nectar. And flowers need bees to move the pollen from stamen to pistil. This is yet another example of the interconnected web of all existence.

    If you want to keep looking at your flower you can take it with you. But please leave the magnifiers here. And now you return to sit with your families again.

    Diagram showing parts of a flower