Monday Blues

It's most decidedly not the fact that the sky has been holding this flat gray light for hours since daybreak. No. It's not the cold that lingers despite being the last day of February. It's not even the forecasted snow coming in tonight. Each peaceful piece of this grayish and slow Monday has no bearing, it seems, on the carnage we've wrought. Gray is not murder. Laying the groundwork for civil war, that is. As I motored along route 117 this morning trying to find depth of color, or some sign that this day would somehow turn more magical, the word came of a suicide bomb in Iraq. 100 plus killed. We waited to build security until the very process of building security could be sabotaged. I do not mean to say the bombers are right. I mean to say, we knew how wrong they were and then left the whole flank of civil Iraq open to their terror. Rumsfeld did this in his arrogant opposition to Army war plans. Rumsfeld made this war and made it more terrible than it even had to be. For the first he should be tried for war crimes, for the second, he will have to face his own conscience, if ever he finds one.

The sun breaks now and again, lighting the crystalized snow cover, casting silhouettes of dogwood and Norway maple, opening the open forest to pattern and depth. I see sap coloring the buds, bark creeping ever outward and inward to support its own weight. I see wisdom in the trees, logic and truth. It is not the gray day that makes me sorry. Nor the leafless trees nor proto-spring nor cold air or the flat color of Earth today. It is these men who haven't seen this truth undermining hope across the globe. They are who wear me down. Beware of too much principle, said the preacher yesterday, and too much righteousness. Humility is the way of things.

Transition

Reds are everywhere across the forest canopy now. Reds, and auburns, the color of life renewed. I didn't used to notice these signs of spring, proto-spring. It was all brown and gray, I thought, and then, one day, green. But this is not the way the seasons have it. Now, under two inches of fresh snow and freezing temperatures, roots send sap skyward, the sugars fuel leaf construction. The drive on 117 this morning touched a primitive sense of beauty. I was speechless as clouds of dusty snow feathered through the sunlit forest, giving content to air, susbtance to vast spaces in between trees. Filling a vessel without apparent sides. The pines have a lively look against the crisp blue sky. Powder puffs of clouds waft seaward. In full sunlight, icicles have begun their drip and crystals form and reform on the surface of the snow. These trees do not worry themselves, it seems, but simply plod onward through seasons.

In a car yesterday wondering about that space. Hurling along, three feet from asphalt, the space of the highway is never truly occupied, I thought. Here I am flying through this space, those trees to my right, that grass to my left, and all I know is inside of this small shell, and, even more, where I am right now, right then, was inside my own imagination. Driving forces us to be somewhere else, I thought. How many miles pass without me even noticing but the yellow lines and red lights? Is it conditioning? This, I wondered, is the freedom we defend?

Short Day Overload

It snowed yesterday. It is supposed to snow again tonight. At the same time, against this weight of cold, the buds on the maple trees in every direction have begun to stir. Swelling a dark cranberry color as the sugars begin to fuel the leaf engines. These buds will be leaves before long. This snow will be forgotten. The cold will pass. The days will become livable, habitable.

In the brief moment between running here and there today, I caught five or six of his words as he shamed us in Europe. The man is without a functioning mind. I heard a woman this morning sneering at his claims to be defending freedom in Iraq, "It's an exercise in brutality and bloodshed," she intoned with proper British inflection, "How dare he!"

President's Day

The icy snow is perhaps the most appropriate expression for President's Day. It is winter's day. It has been winter's weekend, really. A frosty chill, snow since midnight. The office of President comes with its mighty symbolism and its debased temptations. It is why we need, more than ever, truly noble individuals, leaders with virtue. It is why the steady course is difficult to attain.

I could hear the bell's of Saint Bridget's echo through the tumbling snow, elegant crystals, cloud droppings this morning. A Norway spruce stands like a sentry at the intersection of my yard and my neighbors'. Its fifty years exceeds our lives. I have a fondness for the tree, its tenacity, its stature. My neighbor cannot stand the tree for the light it steals from her sun porch on summer evenings. Today, snow has covered its reaching branches like frosting. She calls it a pine tree; I do not tell her that its name is spruce. I play music for her church and yet I am not a Catholic. We share boundaries.

There is a beautiful beech grove on the northwest side of an esker up the street from my house in Maynard. Smooth gray bark, majestic peach-white leaves this time of year. The grove is maturing with many trees having come up right next to each other. The oldest have come to share the same trunk at their base. Two trees, one set of roots. These days, leaders with virtue.

Convergences

For all the promises of spring, the swelling buds, the announced nuptials, the drenching rains, mating cardinals, and the freshness, for all of these, it is still, decidely, winter yet. The snow falling outside my house this morning made that case clear. The cold lurking in the air despite a full six hours of sunlight, demands that we remember the dominant temperature of the universe. Spring and summer are merely gifts of life itself. Given a choice, a planet heats up to unbearable temperatures in the face of the sun or its own morning star, and drops to treacherous cold facing the rest of the universe. Unbearable extremes. But an atmosphere (ours the product of life itself) with its own flows and rhythms, can preserve that heat, and hold on to just enough cold. Someone once wrote that the image of Earth from space that graced the cover of Life magazine in 1969 made all of us environmentalists. The thin layer, the film really, that preserved us could be seen in its relative position with the general nothingness of space. That knowledge of frailty helped us somehow. And it hurt us. As I know and feel my own love for this place, this wild and living terrasphere, I hope my own expressions can open eyes and ears and senses of others. I am no idle worshipper, nor easily led to reverence. But, the wind in the pine boughs, the drifting clouds, the sprouting flowers, the budding trees, the migrating birds, and even the softly falling snow. Nature is its own excuse; we can only find our way, or choose not to.

20 more dead in Bahgdad since I got out of bed this morning. And a smug, dangerous, and fully corrupted prince looks the other way, giving companies new protection from the people they harm. Clothing isn't the question, the emperor has no body, no substance, we cannot even fight back effectively because the discourse and the politics and every calculated action is beside the point. Now, more than ever, our own vision of where to go must be articulated. The men who have grabbed the reigns of the United States' mighty government have so carefully crafted their coup that for us to simply respond or reject their overt public acts is to feed them more fodder for our own demise.

Embeddedness

...to steal a new cliche. I think about the morning, Thoreau's favorite time of day, when light cuts over the giant curve of home, painting the clouds far off to the east in subtle yellows and faded whites. Or last night, when the rains never turned to snow. When the spring won once again. I rode home through a heavy drenching sopping spring downpour. Water runnning. The spring was heard and felt and seen. It has carved canyons in the snowdrifts from the blizzard and worn open patches of Earth as large as a Texas ranch. I think about this morning, when the soft frost wilted away at the first rays of sunlight. First the clouds on the distant horizon, then the top of the giant white oak on the Mill Pond, then the Red Oak just beyond my window, and finally me. Water running. And just as I write these words, a mating pair of cardinals land on my windowsill, pecking with their beaks as if to say, what are you doing inside? It is the being part of things that makes us truly human, I think.

And, if we may deduce the opposite, the not being a part of things perhaps causes the greatest suffering. Alienation. Where do I come from? Where do I live? Who am I? There is a contest for identity that has been underway for more than a century now in the United States. There have been winners and loosers. Those of us who believe in the sanctity of life and the profound reality of its existence and our existence in it, those of us who embrace virtue and principle and higher ambitions over accumulation of goods and wealth, we have been losing. Not conquered, mind you, but overwhelmed, marginalized, silenced, and, where necessary, murdered. As another day of brutality unfolds across the globe, I wonder just how it is that we change this trend. Spring might be winning the battle of seasons outside my window, but for the moment, an ice age seems to have settled on human life.

Daffodils

Is it officially spring when the daffodils show themselves? Right outside my window they have begun to peek up through the Earth. They were not there yesterday. Their growth rate is stunning. The air is warm again today, they say it could reach 50 degrees before the temperature falls again to below freezing. Rain turns to snow overnight tonight. Winter doesn't want to let go, but it's fighting a losing battle. As sap flows and water flows and all of life loosens its dormant inertia and lethargy, the days take on a hopeful feeling. Flowering plants risk their journey to the surface in search of sunlight and warmth and all the energies that help them build leaves and flowers and pistils and stamens and start the process of life all over again. I can glance backwards out my window and still see snow in piles from the blizzard of 2005, and in the foreground, little points of hope, ready to remind us all that the miracle continues.

It is shocking sometimes, then, to imagine this self-same Earth put forth such monsters as Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, people who ignore the truths in front of them in order to serve their egos and self-righteousness, and bad plans. Hannah Arendt argued in the 1950s that political ends are so elusive and uncertain that anyone who pursues them without careful attention to the means they take is risking unmitigated disaster. In other words, if we cannot know for certain where we are going, rather than getting there as quickly and forcefully as we can, we must attend to what we can have some control over, the means. To these men, the means, which, if Arendt is right, are everything we have, do not matter. If we must kill civilians, if we must bankrupt the United States, if we must put our young men in the line of fire and terrorism, it doesn't matter because our intentions are good. How can such foolish men acquire so much power at this stage of human history? How can such outmoded and ineffective ideas control the way the world's biggest superpower carries itself in the world. The problem is, these are not idle mistakes. I resent Mr. Rumsfeld for his careless and thoughtless ways, and for making trouble that will continue to affect the lives of my grandchildren years from now. May he pay in kind for his awful decisions.

Mystical Morning

The fog graced the mill pond behind my house this morning when I awoke. Warm air of spring rolling in, pulling the water free from ice and snow, breathing life back into an all-too-cold atmosphere. The whole drive along Route 117 this morning colored by these processes. The Sudbury River exhumes a wafting cloud of fog, impenetrable by the sun shining on either side. To the north, a cloud is wafting up from the Concord and Assabet rivers. Water runs and everything follows. The buckets are are now firmly attached to the ancient maple trees at the bottom of the driveway where I work. Water runs and sap runs. The evolutionary practice of loosing leaves to protect themselves from the weight of snow reverses direction this week. The light during the day tells the plants to begin drawing up their sugars and start powering up the buds. If the maples are at it, so are the oaks and the hickory, the pine and the hemlock. In a few weeks, the faint suggestion of green and red and auburn, as newborn leaves pop out into the world ready to take their turn in the season ahead, will highlight the edges of our forests and enliven our world. New life from apparent death. These next few weeks are precious. The last view of the bare forest until next winter. The miracle of spring is upon us.

And against the persistence of life, the tenaciousness of spring, I hold the ubiquitous yellow ribbon, our present symbol of death. Our present desire to embrace carnage. Why must we support our troops? I wonder, wincing slightly knowing the kind of rage this question may evoke. Are soldiers not themselves composed of minds? Are their minds not themselves capable of discerning right from wrong, truth from lie? Are they to be held to lower standards than the rest of us? I do not believe a single American should die for this misguided cause in Iraq, but I also do not believe that blindly supporting an immoral and unethical cause helps them. Shall we reward people for following orders? At what point is questioning appropriate? If this were Germany 1939, would anyone argue the same sentiments (I'm sure they did)? "Must the citizen ever for a moment, or even in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?" Thoreau asked in "Civil Disobedience." He opposed the United States' first act of imperialism, the invasion of Mexico in 1945. The question still holds today, as a new century of imperialism begins. This government acts on behalf of its citizens, and its citizens do not take such responsibility seriously. They would rather have their SUV's and low gas prices and full supermarkets and choices of consumables from all around the world, than to choose to live in harmony with their true conscience, and in harmony with their true family of beings, and in harmony with their true home place, Earth. I would like to throw out all the silly yellow magnets and replace the administration's evil catchphrase with something truly compelling: Support the Truth. That would be a nice beginning.

Saturday in the Office

What the hell, right? Why am I at work today? Oh, right, I remember, Saturday program. People learning to identify wildlife tracks in the snowy landscape. Trackers tell us that when you see an animal in the wild, you've already ruined its behavior patterns. If you see it, it has already seen you and is making diversionary moves. Guaranteed. But tracks, the remnants of the animal's movement when no humans were lurking, reveal a lot about animal behavior. We've got 60 people out in Walden Woods today looking for these signs, recording them, adding them to our own animal monitoring database. They came this morning, sat politely for an hour as we briefed them on the practice of tracking, and now they are all in the field. It's a joy to introduce people to nature. They always learn something new. Lots of kids here to day, too.

More death and destruction in Iraq, car bombs, a judge was executed. Bush and his cronies are so incredibly short-sighted that they walked right into this horrible trap. Bin Laden knew Bush's character and played it to the hilt. Now death and destruction are a daily thing in our lives in America and a daily thing in their lives in Iraq, Americans and Iraqis now locked into a sick fate. It's immoral. It must stop. I can't keep silent about this for a single day.

Snowy February

It feels like spring today, as long as you don't look at the ground, which is blanketed in a new, wet layer of snow that fell overnight. The forest near my work is magical. Every branch, every tree, is highlighted by an inch of white. One feels themselves transported to a calmer place by just staring into the forest. Why does nature influence our moods so strongly? Some scholar friends of mine seem to think it is because we have been conditioned to see nature in this way; it is a cultural lens. I think they are spending too much time in windowless library offices and not getting their feet dirty enough. I think it is because we learned the very idea of meaning living inside a meaningful world. We are at home on Earth, of the Earth, this is our family. Nature says, see what I can do? And we smile.

Rumsfeld, the evil ideologue helping to destroy our country, is in Iraq today. He tells American troops that they must stay until Iraqi's can be trusted to run their own security. This is the first major disaster of the 21st century. It wasn't 9/11, it was the ideologues in office who turned that tragedy into a snowball of tragedies. Thoreau says, "Under a government that imprisons anyone unjustly, the only true place for a just man is also in prison." We should stop being so complacent and protest this tragedy in the strongest civil way possible. In the meantime, I can only hope their own arrogance destroys them, like Nixon.

Gray Day

There was no sun this morning. I usually wake at 5:30 or 6:00 to begin writing. I like to see the thin sliver of light take over the eastern horizon. It makes the dark part of the morning sky turn a deep, almost loving blue. Burnt pale yellow right at the horizon line. Not so this morning. These heavy rain clouds block out the sun. Sunlight can only travel so far through water, then it dissipates into a weakened, diffuse glimmer before fading out altogether. It is the same with good ideas and people's thinking.

What are the lies they will spin today? We find, through creeping information released, that 9/11 didn't even have to happen. That this corrupt administration was busy looking the other way and worried about its own ideological pursuit of power. It did not protect those thousands of people in the Twin Towers that morning. It did not want to, I suspect. These are evil men. They have no qualms about lying in order to achieve their ends. Worse still, they couch it all in self-righteous terms as if they have somehow cornered a market on moral behavior. If it weren't so terribly bloody and murderous, it would be laughable. What kind of society lets its leaders lie to them and kill in their name for economic ends? What have we become?

The Beginning

I needed to write.

High clouds wisp across the graying sky this afternoon. Snow is predicted for tomorrow again. Now that I watch the seasons, they seem to move along much quicker. Or, maybe it's an age thing. Maybe my sense of time has sped up. Whatever the cause, this winter has moved quickly. It was just yesterday that the leaves turned and fell from the trees. This morning I saw buds on the dogwood trees down near Lincoln Center growing thick with anticipation. A new song bird serenaded me when I washed my car on Sunday morning. I feel the longer days in my bones.

I wish the natural world was the true touchstone of life today. But instead, there's that horrible, immoral budget put out there by the President this week. There is daily death in Iraq. I have a daughter who is almost four and a son who is almost two and I am terrified about the world they will inherit. Thoughtless, money hungry, unethical societies that eat people for lunch and let someone else worry about the crumbs. These are not spring days in the history of mankind. We are in the dark winter right before solstice when days are too short and air is too cold and people are too bundled into themselves to be identified.

And so I begin...