Hiatus

The spring progresses with an alacrity that thrills the senses. I wish that I had more stolen moments to recall and reflect. However, I fear I must pause my daily reflections for one month while the unfortunate realities of economic necessity consume my every waking hour. Please check back often, but do not expect regularity until after April 26.

Know, however, that every thought must be to unseat these madmen and turn a tide toward better days.

Peace.

Retreat

The snow melted back over the weekend and beneath the layer of frozen snow the daffodils have been growing. They are bigger than they were before the snow. They embrace the principle of persistence and hope, the true reflection of nature. The early morning drive along 117, sun rising higher every day, the sweet two note chime of the chickadee's spring song, wildlife stirring, each threat of snow made by the local weatherman is merely cause for chuckle. The ominous weight of winter has truly passed now. Days are longer than nights and will be for six more months. Joy fills the recesses of my heart and the landscape all at once. We are light loving creatures. We know its strength. Even those of us embracing night, only do so in firm rejection of our truer condition, aware of the delicious abnormality of sunless life, thrill-seekers. I welcome spring.

They say that sometimes a negative thought must be expressed to clear the idea out of the air itslef. I look at George Bush and everything he stands for and hope against hope that this is such an expression. Get these thoughts out of the air, clear the way for true enlightenment. Old, worn, tired ideas about dogma and the evil that men do, doctrines imagined by callous men trying to protect an institution, afraid of the true potential of true men. Perhaps we must be forced to regress in this way if only to see how much better we really know than that. One cannot escape the weight of their own deeds. And so it is with George.

Marching

It is Marching. Every day over the same well-worn roads, thaw pulling chunks of asphalt, leaving potholes filled with watery grit. Trees with elbows and hands like branches reaching out across the road, oaks leaning perilously. Redding buds. A majestic sunlight paints highlights across the expanse of field between me and the distant Wood. The Sudbury river, flat like a roadway wends itself through the landscape, a black stripe still lined with snow, placid, the perfect mirror for the sky above. Giant white expanse of still-snow-covered Farrar Pond, a former wend in the Sudbury River, an ancient oxbow. These last days of winter with spring rising are days of hope expressed in Nature. Earth renewed, the resurrection. The dogwoods near Dougherty's Garage in Lincoln glow a soft green now as their fuzzy buds prepare to burst into flower. I will miss the passing season, the open forest, the trees fully naked, the vision afforded, and the insights allowed, but I welcome the rising life. March has come and we are marching.

Amidst these changes in my place, I smell a rising tide of dissent. A quarter million chime in in one day to save Alaska. A public relation's buzz more thoughtful and better timed than the disaster the Bush team has led us into. I see cracks in the armor now, I hear the quiet rising of opposition. Keep your ear to the ground and your voices loud, the tsunami of Truth is on its way.

Light

Bare boned trees back lit by the rising sun watering my eyes as I journey east along 117 appear almost mystical. There are new birdsongs in the air. The long row of 100 year old silver maple trees lining the south edge of Verril Farm have all pushed their buds into several generations, opening their chlorophyl-filled cells slowly, but deliberately. Nothing green there yet, but we know it's almost ready. There is something peaceful about sunlight at 6:00 a.m., something majestic about the way towering white pines glow in its light and soften further the softness of the early morning sky. Three hawks in 24 hours, one right over the top of my house. There is, it seems, much I should be paying attention to these days. The melting opening landscape, this greening Earth, the slow return of motion, living motion, perceptible.

Two years ago today, George Bush made his final threat of war. His destiny in infamy cast by this foolish and careless imperialism. George Bush, who recovered his reputation from the wallows of alcohol abuse and cocaine use to convince a nation of un-critical Christians that his way was God's way, has no business in that office any longer. His illegal war must stop. He must be brought to justice for launching it. I hear rumors of Pinochet coming to justice, at last. Even mumbles that Kissinger's time will come. The slow, almost imperceptible movement of life convinces me that each of these criminals will pay in time. There is little to justify the intentional perpetuation of war and fear and hate.

The Trees and I

The way the wind ripples through the bare branches of the trees this morning makes them look alive. Are they reaching for something? The constant motion, if you stop and look, reminds us that our machines and our technologies and our organizations are but pale imitations of the greater context where they were made. There is nothing wild in a computer, nothing living, nothing growing. The wind blows and the computer does not bend. This living world, this is where our life is sourced; this the true rhythm. The trees dance, then, and I notice, and between us we agree.

We despise the greed and corruption. We despise the men who stole tax dollars to build a failing highway underneath Boston, and the recently convicted CEO who lied to everyone about his company and left thousands to pay the price with their retirements and savings. We despise the lying alcoholic in the White House who kills and calls it justice, who steals and calls it parity, who runs a government so far away from our founding ideals that Jefferson and Hamilton must be rolling in their graves. We despise the petty, trite, and listless people who collect paychecks for doing no work and then complain about being underpaid; and those who destroy the lives of millions around the globe for want of goods and then complain if anyone says the real word Justice. We are tired of the lies and deception that so many carry as their front. We long for real, true, people. We long for those who avoided the selfishness trap cultivated by this culture, for honesty and integrity and virtue. May I please, in my lifetime, meet a truly virtuous man? This century doesn't appear to be fertile ground.

And so the wind ripples through and the sun rises higher and we beg to the Universe for a sign of change in this frozen arctic of a national culture.

Sunlight

Long shadows as the sun creeps up over the crest of the forest. The air is fresh today. The clouds light. The oppression of cold winter aridity and biting winds feels like a distant memory, but for the snow still covering the ground. I heard a robin singing with joy at the sunrise. I move with lighter steps in this atmosphere, waiting for a warm wind to kiss my face with the promise of summer. The wisdom of trees is proven now, as running water and warming air greet their already opening buds. The slow seasonal tilt toward sunlight crests a milestone on Sunday when spring officially arrives, but we're close enough now to truly feel it. It not only warms us, it feed us, sending its rays into the chlorophyl of plant matter, providing the energy that fuel photosynthesis, the miracle of sugar production, the foundation of life itself. As the tall pines seem to smile in the basking warmth of sunrise, I feel at home, content, in place in nature. The spring also rises in me.

And so, the violence being perpetrated by Washington, the killing and the stealing and the installation of middle class poverty as a way of life in the United States seems contrary to the very goals of life itself. Nature must cringe at the condition, I cringe for Earth. These men who wrap themselves in flags and pretend to stake out morality are evil men. They say the terrorists require these evils, but they are the terrorists. They terrify me, diminish my children's future, harm my parents' well-being, pull rugs out from under my siblings, offend my neighbors, and bring a shame to our great nation. My slow persisent resistence to their evil ways, like the buds opening slowly, awaits a true springtime of culture in this country, it hopes for the sunlight of truth, a solstice for our better selves.

Blue Monday

The weekend was snowy, but felt less winter than any snow previous in the season. When the cold drops low, the air grows less humid and there is a sense that the very fiber of reality is stretched just that much too tight. A needle poke here, or a slight tear there and the whole structure could collapse in on itself. There is, in these moments, just barely enough matter to hold things together. But this past weekend, the wet spring snow evoked the very opposite sensation. It was as if the world was too full, overfull. There was heavy wet snow on the ground, heavy wet snow on the trees, heavy wet snow in the air. It felt full, this world. And today, the sun rising bright well before 6:00 a.m. and the air slowly warming against the still snow-covered Earth, I feel a passing of winter. Six more days, on the solar calendar, but, to me, it was over as of this weekend, when spring dictated the quality of storm.

The crisp blue sky alludes to clarity. But we learn that clarity is the last thing our President would like us to attain. Faked news reports generated by the administration lie about the situation in Iraq and the need for the terrible legislation they keep championing. I have my fingers crossed that the very weight of their thoughtless arrogance will crush them. How many more of us have to die before that happens?

The quiet changes

The morning greeted me with bitter cold again today, although temperatures have risen into the just below freezing mark. I heard a single bird, a common bird whose name I do not know, crying out as the sun came up. I watched the temperature rise. The sun shone for less than half an hour before becoming slowly eclipsed by thickening clouds. Another snow storm, just about upon us now. I worried earlier in the winter that the ground would be too dry coming into spring. No worries now. Another warm spell is around another corner. Slowly the new layer of snow will melt, saturating Earth. This cold will lift. The birds will no longer complain.

Spring Clouds

There's a real for need for optimism. True honest optimism. I think the Earth feels it. It expresses it. The daffodils, now buried again under a foot of new snow, feel it. The very existence of optimism proves its own need, I think. It came from this Earth, it is of this Earth. Some say the ideas we carry are of our mind only. I'm with Owen Barfield who reminds us that meaning can really only emerge in a meaningful universe. Pattern, metaphor, even language. It all has roots. It all begins in the soil. In Washington, these unrooted men and women operate from a position of non-optimism. Their pragmatism and hunger for power requires fear. You must be afraid. You must feel that you need them. George Bush calls himself a Christian yet he wouldn't know Christian humility if it turned the other cheek on him. We need optimism, expressions of our best selves, virtue.

The daffodils, safely insulated from yesterday's arctic air under one foot of fresh snow. The mist of Tuesday morning slowly let loose into a steady rain, whose heavy drops grew more and more crystaline over the course of an hour before a full fledged snow storm was underway. The wind picked up, the snow continued to come down through the afternoon and into the evening, laying the soft blanket of silence atop everything. Me in my little station wagon trying to make it home along route 117, stopped multiple times by the shear force of the wind and snow. I was a gnat against a howling wind. I stopped and waited to see, laughing with delight at the shear totality of force mustered up by our climate. I read Herodotus in early graduate school. He was the last of the mythical historians, we were told, because he still talked about gods as if they were forces of history. Then a close reading of the the text showed all god-like acts to be in the form of floods, or torrents, or storms of all sorts. Herodotus talked about Nature and Earth as forces of history, I concluded, and merely used the language of gods to set the narrative. Do we do the same today? The storm reminded me how similar the experiences of the forces of nature have been over the epochs. Will we ever find out higher selves there?

Misting Rain

This morning for the first time in weeks the temperature was above freezing when I awoke. The house felt like it could breathe for the first time in a season. I know it is supposed to pass for colder air today, but even now the rains mist down through forty degree air. The snows are slowly loosing their territorial battle, melting back first from the base of trees and large structures carrying the suns energy in along the side and underneath the frozen mass. Here, outside my window today, the daffodils have been uncovered overnight by the warm air. They look healthy, vibrant. They don't seem to have been significantly impacted by the foot of snow that covered them for the past two weeks. These rains will be soaked up by the hungry trees. Another freeze and snow may come, but the pace of the vegetation is set for the impending season.

To criticise from a position of weakness is no longer tolerated in this great land of ours. To be weak is to be wrong. To have stumbled is to have been flawed. Ayn Rand would lick her chops with fervent delight could she see what was happening in our economy today. Are there alternatives anywhere putting down roots?

A slow fog begins to lift from the melting snow, filling the lower reaches of the forest with a pleasing hue.

Middle Distances

I step out my front door this morning to an orchestra of birdsong. The sun, ever higher in the sky, the air ever warmer, the birds swoop and dance and play in the fresh light of early day. Mourning doves and crows and robins and other smaller birds perch atop the giant white oak overhanging the mill pond and leap into the air, across the face of the water or high above the tree tops, landing on the opposite side of the street in the top of a row of white ash. Their songs are joyous, they praise the sun and the day and their anticipated time within it.

As I rode into work, I noticed the deception of middle distance. The trees looked winter to me racing by in the car. I had to squint to see any changes. Up close, as I saw again this weekend, buds are pushing open. From a great distance, the subtle changes to the canopy are apparent. But in the middle distance, it is difficult to see. We put our soldiers in the middle distance. They fear for their lives. Shooting innocents is a necessary protective move, to stay alive. They cannot see to walk away or make different choices. That is the power of the modern bureaucracy, business, whatever you would like to call it, it can keep its parts in the middle distance. There can be no conscience where there is no consciousness. The army follows the corporate world in modeling their institutions. These human structures are by design. To know too much might change the course of world history. So we put the mass of men where they cannot see. We put our shopping in the middle distance. Our banking. We put the trail of tears running from every object of consumption out of sight and out of mind. And then we build our cultural logic out of the thin veneer of half-truths left behind.

Accolade

I love this Earth. I feast on the vistas and marvel at its life. I admire the slow persistence of the things this place has spawned and relish the opportunity to be a small but conscious part. I write, in the end, to celebrate the fact of life and living and to remind you that you too are part of this incredible, sublime, unexplainable miracle. Do not waste this gift.

The colors continue their slow creep into the forest canopy. Maples have more red. Weeping willows, more yellow. A lighter ruddiness to the oak. And, up close, like unfolding hands, cups within cups, the buds gradually open for another seasons. "Nature will bear the closest inspection," Thoreau wrote in "Natural History of Massachusetts." "She invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain."

Behind the tree tops shooting high into the sky, contrail cumuli mark the paths of a thousand travellers through the early morning sunrise. After a minute, another silver bullet seems to coast across the very top of the world. On NPR this morning, they asked if Move-On.org hadn't lost all of its battles because it had moved too far to the left. Too far to the left? As if we've seen the left anywhere near American politics in the past 30 years. The center is now staked off as "leftwing" and the remaining vestiges of goodwill and caring for fellow being, the idea that ethical and just social action is wanted, have been sent beyond the margins of discourse altogether, into the exile of inattention. We prefer the violence of war, the barbarity of absolute certainty. Our nation would rather bleed to death from unacknowledged foolishness than make the slightest adjustment to the facts of its existence. Too far to the left? Pity us.

The Hawk's Insistence

Yesterday on the way home along route 117 I saw a juvenile Red Tail Hawk perched on the eastern most of the silver maples lining the roadside just west of nine acre corner. They say when a hawk is sighted, you should think about whatever you were thinking about at that moment. The hawk reminds us to pay attention to what we are doing, thinking, and saying. It sat with its eyes to the northwest, its back to me. Mottled and checkered brown and white. The snow tumbled into the night all around him.

The sun comes earlier every day, perceptibly now. First it strikes the clock tower behind my house, then it lights up summer hill out my second story window in orange and yellow, and then it settles on my house, shining in the back window of the kitchen and then, when it has crested the garage next door, right onto my kitchen table where I sit and write. Not long ago, I didn't see the sun until I drove east to work at 8:00 a.m. Today, it greets me before I get dressed. Longer sun, longer days, active trees. The buds are pushing everywhere out of the branches. Every large tree is get pimpled in growth. Pushing, pushing, pushing, the gradual accumulation of cells, circulatory systems, life. There is a foot of snow on the ground and it is 20 degrees this morning, but spring has sprung.

Does that make for a nice metaphor for those of us defeated by the culture of greed? Charlene Spretnak, in The Resurgence of the Real thinks so. She detects an underlying culture of place and person and identity persisting against the totalizing force of modern culture - market culture. Buds on the trees, gradually, cell by cell, building the leaves that will fuel the summer's growth at the same time an icy chill grips the landscape. Summer nested in winter. Hope nested in hopeless times. May the sap of truth fill the leaves of justice before this winter of barbarity kills us all.

Can We Harvest Our Generosity?

For the untrained eye, it is another beautiful winter day out there. Scattered cloudiness. Sun cutting through the forest along the edges of Walden Woods at Farrar Pond. There is a stand of pine trees eighty or ninety years old, towering straight into the air. The lower branches in a pine forest die as all energy is put into the sun catching canopy. The pine holds its dead for years, whorls of wood evenly spaced along the spine of the tree. Today, holding graceful curves of snow. Nature is the gothic on days like today. Majectic curves, towering upper reaches. We can see the entire trunk of the tree swaying in the high strong wind. Is that more cold coming our way? The globs of snow that plunged off a white oak branch on the border of Concord and Sudbury exploded on impact, visually reminding me of violence half a world away.

The civil war appears well entrenched at this juncture in Iraq. We cannot even keep a secret tribunal secret. A judge and a lawyer killed overnight. Two more car bombs today. Two Human Rights groups have filed a suit against Rumsfeld for nine cases of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq. Men who instigate, supervise, and oversee such violence should not be allowed to serve in public life. We glibly hate the terrorists in other countries, but embrace the terrorists who act on our own behalf. It is time for real moral vision. Thoughts and practices and policies that celebrate life, and the living of life. Not these hateful policies of murder.

No Newsday

Which isn't to say that nothing happened. I borrowed an old pair of snowshoes and wandered into the woods this morning. I had noticed on the drive to work that patches of forest were laden with snow, others were bare as if no snow had come. I figured it for wind patterns. The snow is a light powder, deep above the ankles, so even snow shoes only keep it slightly at bay. I saw mouse tracks from early this morning. But mostly, the snow was untracked across the beech grove. The beeches and maples and cherries have all begun their seasonal renewal. Up close, you can see the second and third generation of proto-leaf pressing outward. It looks a little like a tight cone of paper unfurling, but more patterned. Teardrops within teardrops, opening skyward. The beeches have a reddish orange color. The lowest part of the proto-leaf just beginning to emerge has a light orange color, putting a stripe through the otherwise red bud. You can see the shape of buds making their slow reach out of every branch in the forest. Some are yellowish, some are darker. Trees do not concern themselves with snow or cold or ice or what we humans cower from and wait. They obey the light.

I did not turn on my radio as I drove to work this morning. I did not read the newspaper. I listened to my children marvel at the snow in the forest.