Climate

The humidity has been heavy these past two days, layering a haze of suspended water particles just above the earth. They jump out and stick to anything cool, perhaps they even nourish these green plants who haven't seen root water in almost a month. The season of summer is upon us. The plants in full regalia, green of every hue, and us stripped down to our bare minimum, exposed flesh, perspiring skin. For plants this is the busy season, for mammals, we slow down. Everything with its cycle and season. These rhythms move slowly, almost imperceptibly, but persistent nonetheless. It was but a hundred days prior, a hundred rotations of the earth and a third of a rotation around the sun, when this very same patch of ground was locked in ice and cold. When weeds and flowers lay dormant beneath the snow as energy-bearing root mass or the potential of seed. When trees were barren and gray, holding fast to their stored sugars well below the frost line. That time is all but forgotten in the lush green of summer. And it is as if it will never be upon us again, though we know that it will. I have noticed that plants themselves consist of varying cycles, even in their flourishing months. There is a period of slow growth or no growth when, I am guessing, the plant gathers up stored energy and pulls what it can from the sun, and there are periods of rapid, almost frenzied growth, when this energy is quickly converted into leaf and stem and stalk, a gathering and an expression. To be always on the go, Nature seems to show, is unnatural.

I wonder how we have removed ourselves so completely from these facts of life, these truths of healthy existence. I have no doubt we have. I know the myth of the need to conquer nature, I hear the parable of modernity that says before we had all these trappings, the technology, the climate control, the transportation and communication infrastructure, we suffered and starved and led lives of misery. I think history, however, has been foreshortened in these tales. 500 years, or a 1000 have come to stand in for tens of thousands of years of sustained human habitation. That they have made their domination less miserable does not negate the domination. We are too short-sighted in modernity, and, in truth, we still suffer and starve and lead lives of misery. It is these lies we have been drilled to believe that harm us most.