DECEMBER 31, 2005

The Christian calendar is not mine in spirit, but it is impossible to duck the tendencies of a millenia. Light and shadows, insides and outsides, there is a persistent delimiting in a world that deserve deliberation. Nevertheless, on this holy day of endings and new beginnings, at the end of this tenth month of the pre-Roman calendar, I feel the gentle tug of nostalgia color my emotions and shuffle my thoughts. It is hard to buck tradition. Forgive me.

When I began this project last February, I did so because I needed to write. It was no more complicated than that. As time wore on, as I kept at writing, through February, March, and April, what was at first a pushing kind of insistence about nature - lyrical, I think, but trying almost too hard - settled into a patterned juxtaposition. I wanted to find something stable and consistent against which to measure the unmeasured assaults of our current politics. I wanted to see how the war and the budget and sights and sounds blaring across the tv and internet measured up against the reality of everyday. How does the force of my government compare to the forces of nature? But it was not until late May, when I think I found a rhythm, when a sudden richness in things and subtler sense of connectivity began to emerge in the posts - it being spring no doubt contibuted to the seeming success. I posted nothing in June and not again until July 16 when I marked the rise of summer and made some bitter remarks about people who shall remained unnamed, but who deserved those bitter remarks (and much more) for what they do (or rather do not do) everyday. Then came August, the month of my birth, and I began to reference photographs and draw more accurate parallels based only on species' characteristics and the vile goings on in Washington. Through September, and the first part of October, I continued in this vein. These were the fruitful months, when the seeds planted in spring began to bear fruit. But, like the seasons, my own words waxed and waned across the year. By November, the posts were forceful and clear and well-developed, but scarce. There are only four posts from December. The year has been unique, and yet the curve of energy has been as familiar as tomorrow's sunrise. I bid 2005 farewell and welcome in the new year.

This holly tree Ilex opaca, a known evergreen, seems to be sprouting new growth this week. The rains have saturated the soils and the warmish weather has encouraged growth. This traditional Christmas shrub is also used by herbalists in tea to ease the pain of fever and its berries are consumed by several native song birds. It was impossible to photograph in focus as if to say, "you and your probing eyes!" As if to mock me a little. The holly tree startled me growing this early in the year, or starting so late in the year - since it must have sprouted in mid-December. Do they grow this way ordinarily? Is this climate or species unique? It is the first growth of the year, its hearty red-edged leaves unafraid of frost-filled nights and the threat of snow. They clench their stalks like newborn lemurs on their mothers. And it will have a good head start on everything else in my yard and the ecosystems surrounding me this year. Tomorrow for politics again.

May your year be peaceful and prosperous in the most generous ways; may you flourish like wildflower after drenching spring rains. May you find your place, in every sense of the word. Happy 2006!

Adaptation

These Aster stalks and the snow and the darkness combined as an image of the final day of fall. Here, even the heartiest plants have fallen dormant, nights stretching for more than sixteen hours, frigid winds and desiccated air. I only see crows and pigeons and an occassional flock of sparrows. The song birds have gone south. Our neighborhood skunk left last year after the removal of poison ivy and has not returned. The squirrels do not even venture out very often, sleeping the day away. This deepest chasm of darkness, the tilt of the Earth against us, the life giving sun skipping most rays across our day at too steep an angle to hold firm. I look into a five thirty a.m. summer sun at eight thirty a.m. here in the final hours before the longest night. The season of declining light may not bother everyone, but it has never sat well with me. An unconscious reaction, a sullenness, always overtakes me through the waning days of November and December. I see the husks of plants long dead, the empty branches of dormant trees, I hear the hollow crunch of frozen ground, all through the half-light of a sun that seems to be leaving us. And then into tonight, the solstice, the longest night of the year, past the border, the nadir, the farthest lean; the luminous year is re-born this evening, the resurrection of the sun begins. Slowly through the next days and weeks the truth will become obvious, we will feel it in our bones, we will sense it in our spirits, a new year is upon us. New opportunities, new hopes, a growing of light across the land. For me then, not calendars, nor holy-days of human scripture, but this patterned end of darkening and renewal of light, the gift of orbit that contributes to all of life's motions, this is the moment that we can share a sense of gratitude that extends universally, that puts us outside ourselves and into rhythms that have lasted eons. Promises fulfilled again and again and again. Life in evolution. Gracias al universo por todo.

It is alway too soon to tell, but murmurs suggest that along with this renewal of season, the arrival of winter also brings a dissembling of authority taken without due process nor legal justification. A strange tenor of fortitude echoes from the mouths of lawmen long since mute. More face time, more desperation. His case has no standing, even if he can score rhetorical points with the faithful. The longer days do not bode well for an administration cloked in darkness. But only time can really know where this will lead. In the meantime, my new year wishes: May our next full orbit be more peaceful than our last. May sense overcome the senselessness now dominant in cultural and social life. May we all find our necessary and comfortable places with frequency throughout the year. If your path is just and true and your conscience is clean, I wish you continued success in the seasons ahead. To the rest, I wish enlightened change and genuine inner peace before your time has passed. May we all adapt as time requests.

Spruce

These majestic spruce trees, a Norway and a white (Picae abies and Picae glauca respectively), stand at the boundary between my yard and my neighbor's. Spruce is more dominant in the forests further north, but it can be found here in yards and at the edges of parking lots and other reconstructed places. Both trees grow a light, straight wood that, when found on timber company property, is used for pulpwood - relatives of these trees are in the newspaper you read this morning, and the reams of office paper you go through every day. These trees will not meet such fate as long as their roots grow under my property. The big one, the Norway, is home to a squirrel couple that has raised a few litters of young already. The white spruce has produced small but abundant cones this year. Squirrels love the seed of the white spruce above all others. The sqirrels have, in effect, built their home next to the supermarket. According to Berndt Heinrich, these trees are wonderful examples of the effects of climate on evolution. These trees are adapted to snow. Their branches are curved toward the sky, but are comprised of springy wood, thicker on the bottom of the branch than on the top, and can withstand bending nearly straight down, if nesessary. They do not resist the weight of snow, they absorb it, perfectly. Too much snow and the branches bend at an angle steep enough to drop it to the ground. You've seen it. The rest of the time, they stand, proud, majestic. Secure in their place at the edge of my yard, comfortable upon their plot of land. Useful to the living dynamics of this piece of fill between the Assabet spillway and the Assabet River. Life and home at once.

To see the general well-fittedness of things out there in that non-rational complex of living things is cause for concern. Here in our own constructions, fittedness is an increasingly elusive end. Indeed, it is not even an end at all in this country. To fit, one does not stand out. To not stand out is death among my people. Non-fittedness, then, has become our main social ambition. We talk a good talk - I think we have even convinced ourselves - and we keep the volume up persistently, drowning out any risk of hearing or seeing the real truth. But these opposing tendencies are cause for concern. The ambition of spectacular individualism stole the promise of a family from my childhood, so I am not partial to it. I have seen it rot the imaginations of otherwise great men and elevate base men to places of influence. The genius of democracy is its respect for the inexplicable general fittedness of things out there. The trouble with our current situation, is its singular focus on material gain - which is nothing other than the disassembling of fit, the deconstruction of the non-rational order of things. Not just more bombs, more deaths, more dead-end policies from a rotted and corrupt political order, but more seemingly benign offenses as well - volumes of plastics, buckets of lies. May we be like the spruce branches, springy enough to drop the burden of winter without breaking ourselves.

Siempre verde

Evergreen ivy, (Hedera helix), some variation of English ivy that has been planted here at the edge of the yard. It reddens in the winter cold, but it does not lose its leaves. It does not need to; they do not cluster out on the edge of branches like tree leaves. They do not threaten to open the ivy to disease or rot after a heavy winter storm as winter leaves on a large diciduous tree would. The English ivy can afford to be an evergreen in any climate. The varieties of this plant are almost uncountable, some poisonous, some invasive, like the British themselves, the English ivy seems to have imposed itself just about everywhere. It has a flexible but strong woody trunk capable of sprouting roots at every leaf juncture - it can break and still continue growing. I can remember a time when I thought an evergreen was a pine tree, rather than the other way around. I know several people who still make the same mistake. This is not the same individual plant, but it is also an evergreen and an English ivy (Hedera helix). They come in many forms, many varieties. This one grows more bushy and close to the ground, putting out many runners from a single center. The one above shoots out along two main branches - mass versus length. The grass also stays green, not the crabgrass or most broadleaf weeds species, but the thin leafed bluegrass. Photosynthesis lives on through the snow and cold. Winter mutes, but it does not halt. It gives some an advantage.

Across the Atlantic George's most disciplined minion, Ms. Rice, confirms torture and denies any ability to really make it go away. In Congress, Senators creep toward re-authorizing the suspension of civil liberties in the name of fighting boogie men. The whole edifice is growing transparent. Instead of the kinds of far-sighted policies being embraced by Al Gore five years ago (and still today) we have been driven into war, we further eroded social and ecological stability around the globe, and our heads of state justify torture in public.(!) It can get worse, apparently, before it gets better. They are like ivy, able to sprout even when they are broken.

Crystals

Winding down the final days of another round-trip through the solar system. That anniversary comes two weeks from Wednesday during the longest night of the year. It is customary, I suppose, to wait the additional week and a half just to be absolutely certain the sun is returning before giving in to celebration. One should never be too hasty about such matters. Today I saw the squirrel that lives in the Norway spruce tree behind my house hard at work insulating its nest again. I startled it as it rested on the fence post, arms embracing as many leaves as it could hold. It would have to drop its morning's work if it had to jump away quickly, so it paused, waiting to see what I would do. I talked softly, "Don't worry, I don't want your leaves. Go on up." It turned its back to me and jumped up the tree the slow way. I could hear its partner - it's sibling? - packing leaves away already in the nest above. The snow has roused them into busy action. It has coated everything and turned the world a few different shades of white and gray, little else. It makes you long for the crackle of well-seasoned logs radiating warmth into a circle of flickering faces. It reminds us of something deep in our past, the challenges overcome in out-migrations across millenia. And that is nothing compared to the memories carried in the conifer spruce, who have ridden the vagaries of time and place over epochs, remaining eminently adaptable. The snow is not life's enemy, by any stretch. In some corners, it is considered part and parcel of life's journey, an activity worthy of pursuit, a condition challenging in all the right ways toward maturity, or knowledge, or whatever your tribe might have called it. The spruce stands as a shining example of the knowledge possible, if you have the time.

Meanwhile, the United States pours one tenth of the entire world's salt supply onto its roads every winter to keep automobiles moving. More outspoken democrats, particularly, but not exclusively, from the House, seem bent on keeping the momentum through the lazy holiday season. Hold the mongerers feet to the fire. Leave no refuge. Does he know he's a prisoner of the White House? Chances are he doesn't. His practices insulated him from the get go. No matter what the facts, he believes he has been called to send your sons and daughters to kill their sons and daughters. His hubris is staggering - even in this world. It is time to leverage the political gears toward root ideas like equality, justice, individual - not corporate - liberty. It is time to take our heritage seriously. Cultural differences notwithstanding, most United States citizens, a majority I would say, have lost too much under this dynasty, under these inhumane policies of deceipt, to stand by in tacit support or silent opposition any longer. No snow flake like another, no day yet lived yet unheroic.