Aaaah!

As spring should feel, precisely; the knowledge of my body, of my genes, my deep memory, the experience of my spirit, they all know this today. This is as it is, and as it should be. There is a green hue in the sunlit air, which is not too warm and not at all humid. The pedals have blown off the first flowers, dogwoods, magnolias, and other exotics, revealing the leaves and fruit coming in underneath. We see the bees have already been busy. The freshness as if today were the first day. Had it looked like this, we can see why life persisted. It is inspiration manifest, the spirited growth of living things. Do our seasons here in New England make us more sensistive the the necessity of cycles and change? Our willingness to bear long trials, but also our delight to revel in the regeneration of spirit, of life, of the Wild all around us. Thaw has come, water flows, life persists, and I am glad of it.

Bedazzled

Was there ever an Earth not filled with flowers and green leafing plants and trees? Was there ever an atmosphere unpleasant to the skin? It is a season of forgetting, this Spring, of senses so overwhelmed by beauty that the short cold days of winter, the long trial of waiting, the forever anticipation, endless, has been forgotten (or forgiven). An accident on 117 has slowed my pace to that of the saunterer. I can gaze into the wetlands just north of the roadway along the stretch right past the Sudbury border. The forest frame is still visible, but it is fading behind the greening and reddening and flowering tapestry of this eastern Massachusetts forest ecosystem's Spring salute.

Although, we must be mindful that the forest ecosystem is a misnomer; I watch the trees renew from the road, a road, passing houses, behind traffic, we are in the suburbs. This is socially, culturally, economically, hooked to Boston and New York and an urban world of global trade. Our links stretch far past this fading forest frame. This morning, for example, I remembered my time in Buenos Aires. Spring often reminds me of that beautiful southern city. In my mind's eye, the slow walk I would make from Avenida Jorge Newberry down along Avenida Libertador. Hot mornings as I went to teach young business men and women proper ways to make conversation in English, cooled by the spreading branches of enormous towering platano trees. It reminded me of home, those walks, but I didn't know why until returning to New England and seeing the sycamore everywhere. The same tree, different hemisphere. I felt the connection then, but couldn't have spoken it until now. Our links are many across the globe today.

I notice, too, a pleading tone in Bush's speeches these days. Will he make the full conversion before his time is up? We can only hope.

Quenching

To rise without feeling chilled. Light creeping in through pulled shades at the earliest hours. Today as drizzle followed rain and rain followed drizzle, everything living breathed in another height of richness. A tower of proto-flowers assembled out of the cherry bud, cherry leaf in tow; green flowers on maples soaked in drenching air spit microscopic pollen in a wind assisted copulation. Flowers everywhere, really. White dogwood, pink hued magnolias, forsythias yellowing edges everywhere. I notice the oak take the longest, though. Most of them still hold their winter appearance, but for a ruddiness and slight tinge of green at the edges of their fingered branches. Nature shows off these days; we delight in our luck to participate. With the rains these past days I have noticed the birdsong increases with showers. They celebrate with song the running of the water, the final thaw of springtime.

I read of Howard Dean calling Republicans for what they are and Senator Frist, one of the most underhanded of solipsists, threatening to fulfill their Machiavellian ambitions nonetheless. There is time for protest in the streets. Time to find ourselves united around the principles that stand for our best selves. Do not let them think these ambitions will go unchecked. We can be like the oak, patient and thoughtful, but sturdiest of all in the end.

Transformation

There's the slow anticipatory creeping of spring, those weeks and months leading out of January through to the spring equinox, when you can feel the energy building. It expressed itself in growing colors on the ends of branches, and spits of green poking up here and there. Past solstice was something like reaching the crest of a hill, in the high Rockies. Now it is as if we have tucked our heads into the wind and life is bursting out from every pore. Trees flower, grass thickens, the bare forest is speckled in an adolescent puberty of fresh new leaves that create the more porous interface with the atmosphere and the universe than winter allows. These intricate majestic forms, these ordered clusters of cells, cooperating. Rains over the weekend soaked the Earth. It is now being sucked up through the wild flora surrounding us and bursting forth as flower, stalk, and leaf. The bare forest will soon disappear. The infancy gives way to rapid youth. The speed of change has risen; the inter-season shows the real prowess of this place, this Earth we share.

And I know in my heart of hearts that it is a loving Earth. A place where everyone puts up a certain stubbornness to survive, but we all, all of us wild, tend to choose those methods that sustain broadly. Pope Benedict does not believe he lives on a loving Earth. Neither does George Bush or Paul Wolfowitz or Condoleeza Rice. Land and landscape is nothing to them but setting. People, merely numbers. Memory and history, mere happen-stance; your mind serves their singular purpose, an abstraction, or your mind is not well. These lost souls have assembled a devious scaffolding amidst the ruin and fear of uncertainty after 9/11. Their agenda is not a life agenda. Look closely, scrutinize them yourselves, I beseech you. This is not about life for them. It is about power and power merely. Look closely, you'll see. These are not the gentle leaves of spring trusting the warm night air to let them spread their surface to the morning star; this is the raw expression of might. These men have something to prove; their souls are empty of this Earth and they have the arrogance to believe that their minds forged in such circumstances have something better to offer. This is what that book meant by false gods.

To the greening landscape, a prayer for peace.

Earth Day

Lest we forget, if no other day evokes it, let today be the one where you reflect upon the vital connections that link you to your mother Earth. Where are the soils you know? The trees and plants? What wildlife do you see? And those other vistas, where have you gazed across sublime distance, stood awed at mountains of rock, ages of geology? Remember those places and those things and the feelings they evoke in you. We are no longer taught to follow our impulse to love this Earth. Today, of all days, follow it. Here Norway maples burst with green flowers, magnolias at Lincoln Crossing begin to drop the heavy white pedals they showed off this past week. The willows are completely green. Even the Sudbury recedes to its summer channel, fertile fields emerge in its wake. Cultivation has begun. From greenhouse to green Earth in these next few weeks. Where has your food come from today? Your clothing? Your thoughts? As the morning birds cry from the tree tops, reminding each other of plans for the day, let your own soaring spirit connect to the living breathing, pulsing, growing, blooming, springing Earth. Happy day, mother.

And a pox on the house of Bush and Bolton and Rice. Shame on the Senate and the fully corrupted Republican Party. Enjoy these last days, justice will make its revolutions. An Argentinean Naval Officer sentenced to 300 years in prison by Spain for crimes against humanity. He murdered 30 dissenters during the military dictatorship in Argentina; he drugged them and threw them out of an airplane. The world still believes in human rights and humanity, despite the Bush agenda's denial, despite the tenacious anti-humanity of Republican doctrine. Time will turn, seasons will change. I see Norway maple flowers excited to become seed pods and nurture the next generation. I see hope in our springing landscape. Because of this, against the deep persistence that the Wild represents, I find these grasps for power and un-Earthly acts weak like an overbred showdog. Their hips will fail soon enough. Earth will dawn again.

April

In what can only be called an explosion of life, the trees along 117 between Maynard and Lincoln have blossomed. Flowers everywhere. Green whisps on the oaks, proud white pedals of the dogwood. Red flowering of maple. From the barren Earth, green pedals and flowers filling in the gaps, the fragile light green first layered baby leaf poking out into the warm night air. What information turns this cycle? Light certainly, but temperature must as well. Can the trees count the number of frost-free evenings? This blossoming happened everywhere, all at once. Something shared. These past three days, these past three weeks, something in common. Do we feel it ourselves too?

I have intentionally kept the radio and television and newspaper off. I am full of clutter from the past and haven't the room. It's selfish. The less I think of them, the less harm they can do. It's the thought, the habit of the American way, but not the reality. Conscience knows different. The dogwoods showing their prowess, millions of individual plants at once sending forth the gentle offering of new leaf matter, these are the habits we should know. I would beg them to end this war, but that would only bring them joy. So, I merely point out their disharmonic patterns of logic. And I pray for open eyes.

Saturated

It was blink, literally, and now everything has begun rigorous sprouting. Trees are blooming early flowers, the Earth itself sends up shoots. I put my hands into the labor of spring this weekend. Culling invasive Norway maples to break open sunlight for an apple tree that has struggled in the understory for a decade or more. I moved rock and soil and the detritus of last year's fall. Building piles of compost, building more soil. Dropping seeds. Today, in the aftermath of scratched skin and newly worked muscles, I can still feel the warmth of yesterday's sun reflecting up and out of my very core. It was more difficult to leave the children this morning, I wanted to take them onto the swollen Sudbury which runs as a very wide lake through Sudbury and Concord. Water and earth have thawed and are recombining. Here I am, working.

In the blissful silence of knowing that small corner of Earth where I live, I thought I sensed an end to this age of hateful conservatism. Not that crimes will not continue to be committed in our name, they will be. But, that an end is in sight. They have made their expression, grasped their power and will challenge us and our children with monumental tasks. But they are finished. I sense.

On Mist and the Magic of Just Listening

I don't even know where to begin. Was it the way the sun shone across late afternoon yesterday? The way Noah jumped on my stomach this morning. There was something with more flight, more lift, something of an effervescence.

I know I raced too quickly through my favored landscape, where route 117 skirts the boundaries of Maynard and Sudbury and Concord and Lincoln. But I did see the bursting buds of the silver maple, there will be leaves any day now. I have seen the reddening of the whole maple spectrum. And the yellowing of the willows. Even the poplar have a distinct pre-leaf hue. I have seen these. I needed to remember that looking and remembering also required writing. That was my task today. I haven't the time these days. But I needed to begin, and with that spark, those signs, the lifting, I did.

With the wending of conversations that carried a class through a day of discovery. Where the quiet of the forest reminded urban dwellers that they belong in ways they sometimes forget. Through Walden Woods. A tall stand of pine trees, a late adolescent forest of oak and maple and birch. Many shorter pines, just waiting. Well worn paths, but youth in complete silence, practicing contemplation. Remembering what they knew perfectly in their infancy.

Today the mist rolls across the land. The colors are darker greens and greys that remind one of mold and lichen, the oldest life forms. It is a moist smelling forest where ground pine jump to life and pine saplings turn their bark into photosynthesis devices. The season of resurrection, rebirth is well under way. Everywhere, the tongues of grasses and flowers slip up from within the earth into the warmth of sunlight. Everywhere, life.

We will win as we are righteous in our ways. No more finding fault with others without the sincerity of our own devotion. I will scramble and race to assure that truth is a regular expression, that it lifts us and enhances our truest gift, the knowledge of wildness.

"In Wildness is the preservation of the world." Henry David Thoreau, "Walking"