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.