Pocket Full of Posies

Don’t you just hate the Second Law of Thermodynamics? It messes everything up.

I have many friends who are gardeners. When they were in their thirties (often the decade one becomes interested in gardening), they dug and planted and redug and double dug and transplanted and lugged and plugged and did all the heavy work themselves. As their forties and fifties and sixties and seventies relentlessly arrived, they found their knees hurt, their backs broke, their hands cramped, their legs gave out. That’s one of the things the Second Law of Thermodynamics means: systems change.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that any closed system such as the universe or a body or a garden has a growing tendency toward disorder at the price of order. You can see how this Law invades every area of our lives, environments and minds. Those bodies that begin creeping toward disorder don’t work as well as when they were more ordered. This relentless crawl toward disorder is called “entropy.”

So instead of saying, “The reason I have a garden helper now is because my knees are gone,” you could save your pride and say, “Mary complements my entropic tendencies.”

As I see it, entropy is just the result of Original Sin. In the Garden everything was perfect. There were no thorns or thistles and Adam and Eve were meant to live forever. Along came Serpent Satan and beguiled Eve with the possibility of knowledge.  She offered the fruit to Adam and he took it immediately. That’s always bothered me. How fast Adam fell! He didn’t give any objections like Eve did. Eve said to the Serpent, “But God said we’d die if we ate of the fruit of that tree.” She, at least, put up some arguments. The Bible says, and I believe it, that she gave the fruit to Adam and “he ate.” (Genesis 3:6) Just like that. No protestations. “He ate.” So that First Couple forfeited Eden and eternal physical life and plunged us all into entropy. Death entered and with it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That Law is associated with the forward movement of Time. And it’s that forward movement of Time that makes you look for those ads in the newspaper which bring Mary into your garden every Tuesday.