Heavy Winds

It's almost like carnage along the roadway today as maple sprouts and pine boughs litter the ground. Winds of 40 and 50 miles an hour blew through the day yesterday and last night in gusts that challenged the rubbery flexibility inherent in trees. The biggest leaves payed the most. The maples have been culled by nature. The rains continue too. No sun for days, and the Earth taking on a richer deeper hue of green. Even the catalpa has sprouted. Spring is here and lurching toward summer. The oriole has settled in to the white oak near my house. The mockingbird has continued on. The cycles of wildlflower bloom have begun. Celandine, with its oversized hawthorne-like leaves and mustard flowers, grows and blooms at the back of my yard. Ground ivy makes its way up the edges of my fence in a brilliant deep purple. One cherry has bloomed and passed, the other has not yet bloomed. The decorative patterns of the spring New England landscape are enough to make the deepest cynic smile. There is a tenaciousness with more nobility than the seeming forces of human power. And we are glad to know that today.

Rains

Steady water falling, drenching. The contrast of dark brown bark against the nubile leaves of early spring make a pleasing portrait to the eye. It puts one in another place of the imagination. It suggests possibility, hope, joy, peace, even. The rain nourishes Earth. The patient oak and catalpa will gain benefit from this storm even as it inconveniences me. I feel it comes along to slow us once in a while, as we sometimes need to do. I will accept the peaceful image it presents, listen to the gentle plunks and splashing and let it pace my day.

Amen. As they say.

May's Musings

There's a low swamp lying between drumlins at the border of Concord and Sudbury on Route 117. There at the margin between towns where some company has been removing sand and gravel for month upon month. The trees in this lower, cooler region are still in an orange flower stage, swamp maples? Oaks? I do not know, but their colors are vibrantly birthlike. Further down 117 the lantern-like blooms of the majestic horsechestnut tree stands like a sentry fifty feet over the roadway. Mockingbirds sang on the top of the old burned Norway maple at the corner of my lot this weekend as I continued to cull and work this stretch of wild land. A Baltimore oriole has moved in as well. I pull Norway maples, mostly, and the dreaded poison ivy. The pull of muscle against root, flesh against wood. There is something in the working of land and shrubs and trees that feels as if it moves all the right muscles. It loosens thought; it opens ears and other senses. The forest canopy is now converging on the solid green of summer. Maples are full, oaks, are filling (though still yellow), but the catalpa and the sycamore, as well as the hickory, take their time. Opening larger leaves, more complex clusters, at a much less frenzied pace than vines and invasives. I find myself valuing and evaluating the very movement of nature's parts in my working of the land. I find myself seeing something clocks never tell us. Feeling life from the inside.

And I look at Washington. Will our republic survive the grasp for power underway? Have the fanatics won? Will they stop at nothing? These moments have a tendency to tear the fiber of political parties. What fills the vacuum? Are you ready? May the sycamore leaves of our humanity bloom in just the right season.

The Balance

What comes from attention to the rhythms of the wild is refreshingly open ended. We see the genius of Emerson and Thoreau, their knowing that this moment was ours. The universal in an instant. Piles of conscious attention to sift through, the expression of minds in this place over eons. And even there, outside in the nineteenth century, as Thoreau always reminds us, the ancient rivers continued to flow, the mythical adventures persisted afoot. We are living our own Odyssey if we choose. This springing, a bold new adventure. Thick carpet of maple leaves. The oaks still uncurling, still developing. Ash and hickory, yellowed, natal-leafed. The forest I knew only a month ago has disappeared. I look now into a wall of chlorophyl, that magnificent organic device that borrows the outbursts of our closest star and turns them into life. Life! A favorite professor of mine once said that it all comes down to energy, trace those paths and you'll have the story. In Nature, the energy of plants creates the foundation for complex life, biodiversity, elaborate systems reciprocal and flourishing in health, resilient and tenacious over time.

In modern culture. Well, you know where I'm going with this. We've been robbed of the means to independent energy, - or so we think. Our cars, the grids for our televisions and computers, gas lines, sewers. Energy for this system is dominated by a few interests; a group that has grabbed power intentionally. Power rests there. The question one has to ask themselves, or so Thoreau would have it, is am I complicit here? Do I have an option of non-participation? Must a person forever concede their conscience to the whims of commercialism? I'd like to see the resistence that this new machine deserves manifest itself successfully, out of love, for the best of our interests, for the most of us flourishing, living fully, not, as this terrible set of present circumstances has us, bound helplessly to a dying idea that threatens to ruin things for everyone. Direct your eyes to the truth, keep on task. Remember what truly fills your belly, and labor for what truly moves your soul.

Gracias por el aqua, gracias por la terra, gracias por la atmosfera, y la paz por todos.

Life Intensified

Stand close to the sprout on a new tree, these exploding branches and leaves and flowers and fruit, where just six weeks ago nothing but sealed bud rested, and try to tell me there's nothing to be amazed about. No hand of mine, no hand of yours. The more greedy of the species, Norway maples and buckthorn, or the fast growing pioneers like white, gray, and sweet birch, are all leafed out now. Oaks plod along, as if content to build a secure maturity. The hickory has barely shown its face and the catalpa, which will be showing its great white and pink blossoms in a few more weeks, still looks the part of winter. On the forest floor, forest lilies and ground pine, ladyslippers, cinnamon and sweet fern, blueberries and huckleberries. And the sounds of the forest have changed as well. Birdsong of all denominations echo across treetops. They feast on this explosion of tree and plant and insect. They follow it north. Where we are standing still feeling this season come upon us in its gracious and magical ways, these migratory friends are riding a wave of springtime rolling north from the Gulf of Mexico. This is the busiest time of year, outwardly. The cell growth and metamorphoses in the great orchestra of life rise to their crescendo all around us. I drink it in with my senses and glory in the fact of being.

Freedom will not come to those oppressed by the blindingly selfish policies of the present United States regime. Humanity as a premise must be recovered. The evil that men do live after them. Justice, like the ginkgo tree, must push on through the longue duree. The oak is a fine metaphor for our better senses.

Crescent Moons

The crescent moon harkens the new month. Measured by our current months, it is out of cycle. I pause, laugh at the joke. The spring has taken off with fervor. The invasive species, Norway maples, bittersweet, glossy buckthorn, these have brought out full grown leaves by now, as if there would not be enough sun to go around. The older residents, oaks, white and black, hickory and ash, as well as the catalpa, they take their time. Oak leaves are born nearly fetal and slowly expand in size at once with their branch. Norway maples, on the other hand, seem to flower into full grown leaf. Are they a vine? I have been clearing unwanted shrubs and the dreaded, though native, poison ivy from the small patch of Earth beside my house. Putting other plants in pots and in the ground, mowing grass. Absorbing the three or four hours of light still available at the end of a work day. These are the days of physical labor, beakbreaking lifting and pulling, a wrestling of sorts with the overwhelming tendency of life to grow. I am at ease in my stewardship; my thoughts wander to new places as new muscles work the land. I feel a farmer inside me, I find work on the Earth to be part of a healthier whole. The mind must develop alongside the body. Nature presents the greatest workshop, then. When is the next crescent moon? Do you know?

And, meanwhile, back on planet bad karma, memos have surfaced linking the lies we know about to a pre-ordained policy known by Blair as well. There will be jail time for these crimes in my life time. I am convinced of that. We can turn back this war, these evil tendencies. We can. Keep the truth in plain view, no matter what their spin. Pre-meditated illegal warfare is against all the rule of civilized nations. Men who take such steps must be called to account. These Norway maple policies must eventually give way to the staunch spreading persistencies of the oaks of justice.

May Day

And May is upon us. Drizzle and rain all weekend only heightened the growing plant life, enhancing greens, enriching reds, the monotonous gray of tree bark and leaf litter nearly covered over by a symphony of greens and reds and oranges. Ferns uncurl against gravity, skunk cabbage spreads their body, no photon may go uncaught, unharnessed in the forest ecosystem. One day the Norway maple tree flowers, the next, it has produced leaves and stalk, structure, elaborate and living. These giant woody beings surrounding us, growing year by year, one bud at a time, embody persistence. These trees show the dangers of impatience and the sustainability of careful, measured, rhythmed change. They have survived us, and will continue to.

But will we? In amidst this beauty and grandeur of season, fifty more are killed by car bombs in Iraq, women and girls are used as sex object in the act of warfare in Darfur and in the act of capitalism in East Asia. How can sane men sit across the table from each other and discuss such things as nuclear weapons and the violation of economic trade agreements when horrors such as Dickens wouldn't have dreamt take place in the vacuum of their attention to humanity. Is it still our world to change? You tell me. Better yet, show me.