Hydrogen Twice Oxygen

It hasn't been this cold in a regular way this winter, yet. But this night, this cold followed rains and warm weather, sun beating down on white surfaces, exposing something underneath, releasing torrents down the side of houses and roads. I saw the swollen Assabet River this week, spring flow in January. Heraclitus said you can never step into the same river twice. Icicles are different, though. More like river channels and those wrinkles that start to appear, they are products of history, the frozen reminder of past processes. In this case, a snow and a thaw. There is a channel running from my roof along my house, across the canopy porch roof and right down my wind chimes. It runs like a small stream in rainstorms. It freezes in time after a winter thaw. We are told that it is the charge, ultimately, that makes the stuff of rivers and icicles so special. It is a plus and minus molecule, it can hold its surface better than most liquids allowing the rapid accretion of solid from liquid in an atmosphere we can tolerate. It also dissolves most anything that comes its way. For these reason, water is truly life's molecule, a carrier of goods for living systems and also a part of the architecture. These rippled icicles contain ancient molecule, frozen in time before me. Were they in the Pacific last Christmas? Part of a tree leaf a decade before. A person? The possibilities are all there. We know this much, they have traveled great distances, seen more worlds than you and I can imagine, and will continue their journey into the future as far as it reaches, cutting channels, pacing time time, providing life. In these moments of noticing the realm beyond my own motivations, I am both astounded and grateful. But I am also made aware of the dangers posed by consciousness itself: That this gift may fail to deliver on its deepest potential, leaving us prisoners of our own redundant selves, navel-gazers, unaware of the miracle hanging from our wind chimes.

Of that realm, where we mostly abide, a strange stagnation has set in, a calm, not quite calm, but quiet, not quite quiet, where it is as if everyone is holding their breath uncertain which way things are directed. Waiting on fate, almost, as if the end were already decided. The envelope please... Waiting, worrying. A scholar I know has called this age a razor's edge between what we knew of politics and culture and global interactions and what is to come. He says September 11 is the pivot moment and since then, though we all still proceed as if nothing at all has changed very much, nothing is any longer the same. Perhaps culture is like water, never the same place twice, and yet always carrying the burdens of the past. Cutting channels and leaving marks, but itself ephemeral. It is nowhere long enough to find permant home, but it takes all that it washes over to new places. It is still too soon to tell, but the possibility exists that the waters of cultural change will take us elsewhere as well, and we may look up after all and see what is to be seen.

Micus

This ficus tree (a fig of the Moraceae family, but not fruit bearing), also known as the weeping fig and a near neighbor to the rubber tree plant, has been shuttled between indoor winters and outdoor summers since we brought it home in 2002. The idea of this plant, these glossy leaves and its miniature stature, have been with me much longer. Ficus adoration is cultural. This ubiquitous house plant, is actually a native of Malaysia, a tropical country to the southeast of Cambodia and Vietnam. I had one of these standing proudly by my desk when I worked on the 10th floor of a steel and stone office building in Manhattan in 1989. I bought it from a dealer who had dozens just like it, green and healthy standing like an army of life amidst the drab gray concrete and sparkly glassphalt of that raucous metropolis. Within a week, despite direct winter sunlight through tan ultra-violet filtering glass, my tree had yellowed and expelled most of its shiny folliage. Ten million years or more adjusting to a Malaysian climate, then its offspring is seduced into overproduction in a factory greenhouse, and the sapling is hauled unceremoniously into my climate-controlled office building - it is perhaps a good thing that trees have no rapid recourse other than to drop their leaves. At the time, the tree was a way to get closer to natural things, and a way to identify myself or locate myself. I have always brought many plants inside, to be next to me, for this unconscious reason. And I have always held a special place for the ficus. I knew, for instance, that I truly loved my future wife when I saw this beautiful tree growing from the soil in her native city of Buenos Aires, literally, Good Air. They could call it Buena Clima, tambien. The ficus pictured here stopped shedding last summer's leaves in the third week of December. As a species, it is far from home. But as a life form, it has a remarkable sensitivity to the solar calendar. And for its ability to hold my stare and convince me to care for it, to embody memories of a life lived for something, this ficus, and those like it, have to be commended, I think. After all, what is genius but to exploit the accidental for the greater good of all?

It's about tools, not ideology, ultimately. The tools built today have a residual benefit for you and I. This type of electronic space, for instance, was unheard of before the last of the 20th century. But these tools are not built for us. The tools are built by and for centralization and control far stronger, they believe, than any counter trend that democratically minded individuals or groups might foster. They have enormous power, this cannot be denied. In large part this is not only because they have legalized a form of resource control that keeps their institutions flush most of the time, it is also because you and I do not carve out our own space apart from these institutions and their interests. We must take our own hand at creating sustainable practices that will liberate us from the shackles of overproduction and capital concentration. We need ideas that appeal like the form of the ficus tree, beautiful to the senses and seductive to the imagination.

Golden II

The goldenrod (Solidago speciosa) stalks and seed fluff caught the morning light today as the sun rose a new angle between the house across the right-of-way and its decrepit garage. The silhouette of the apple tree I cleared out last spring and shadows on the snow show the sun just over the horizon. This light traveled an amazing distance to perfectly kiss these tufts of plant fiber floating here above the seasonal snow. Across empty space, through the atmosphere, and across a stretch of forest opened by fall and the seasonal retreat of green, this light falls here today. It wasn't there yesterday and it may not be there tomorrow. What happenstance, what curious alignments, what multitude of forces combined over time to make the whole moment possible. The photons have traveled directly, but those plants had to grow last summer just right from the seeds that had fallen from the plant that parented this annual flowering weed to make them grow there. Nevermind the various permutations of seed delivery and protection that resulted in this specific kind of fluff that was struck by light this morning, or the time that went into perfecting these eyes to read those photon reflections just so, or these paths of imagination that find beauty in the very sight. An eternity in an intant, they say, every possibility combined to this, captured digitally here for everyone to see. The links are endless, the time was deep. So must be our ecology.

Bush may have overreached in his greed, and his minions more so in their conviction, but the fall of this house causes mere ripples in the bigger project of empire some see underway. Not just a single party corrupted, but a system. Today's victories of truth over the ravages of George Bush should be pursued further. There are ideals at the root of this place, United States, and traditions. Beyond that, there is a general goodness bound up in most folks. Given the right circumstances, education, and basics like nutrition and shelter, our collective intelligence could steer us a new course. One with future in mind, not futures. A dynamic world without branding or ad campaigns. Truth not spin, life not consumption. Back to the roots, I say. Don't stop now, get this stone up and over, send it down the other side. May the tides be strong as needed and may our own hopeful future find protection in its own tufts of seed casings kissed by a morning star.