Azucena

These extending tongues of lily (Lilium) have just this week pushed up out of the warming soil. How do they know spring and warmth awaits them above? It couldn't be just temperature, January was too warm this year and yet they did not emerge. It cannot be light, can it, for they are too deep underground. Are they able to count? Do their cells keep track and know when it is time to start building leaf and making new cells? Something changes, dormancy is replaced by this sudden urge to life, animation toward flowers whose end is reproduction but whose means create beauty. What purpose these objects, this life, these flowers, this place? To remind us of our own humble beginnings, or as proof in some sort of cosmic argument about the potential extent of self-organization and animation? What is this project we are part of? Surely it is not merely the acquisition of other refashioned products of this great living Earth for the sole purpose of displaying one's power? Surely that is the basest and least imaginative of possible answers. If we can imagine nobility, a greatness transcendent of the ego, is it not these simple leaves, building forth from out of the barren soil? Building magnificent cells, complicated chemical coding that catches ninety percent of the photon energy passing through it. What forces build a cell like that one? What a thing to realize, as well. This named process, photosynthesis, not merely a wonder of nature, but also painted into our imagination. Seen by us, tested and known. These bulbs, pressing cell growth naturally, placed here by human hands last year; buried in soil atop a fill that once held a marsh, the remants of the pleistocene. This long history, the one moment, the future, no loss of beauty between.

The war has continued to fail and flagging support puts everyone in more danger for some time now. Smirking liars dodge and bob and try to hide, but we're waiting for them. There are elections and more elections. There are difficult questions still awaiting answers. George Bush could live out some of his older year in jail if war crime violations are taken seriously. The charade is coming to a quiet end, the coat-tail hangers are taking their things and going home, the patsies are already on their way to prison, and these mealy-mouthed murderers who placed their own financial gain above the better good of their own people and mankind generally, are sneaking about behind closed doors no doubt planning their exit with care. These have been shameful years in this country. mean-spirited, hurtful, and corrupt to the core. But we have placed our own leaf building processes where they can do the most good, we hope. Nobility may yet rise among the American aristocracy, it may yet send its insistent sprout up into the open air of daylight in this country.

Quercus coccinea

The scarlet oak casting its spindle shadow along the south side of my house has not even bothered to start on its buds yet. This one lives at the northern most reaches of its habitat - for now. For now, it is more prevalent in the Ohio River Valley and in the Appalachian middle states. But this one - no doubt brought here and planted by someone - survives quite well despite the many New England seasons. It survives by taking its time in spring. In contrast, the silver maples (Acer saccharinum) are anxious already, building maroon colored teardrop flowers and poking them out into the warming air, breeding before building new leaves. But the scarlet oak waits. The equinox has only just passed and now, with longer days than nights, it will begin to remember. Now the sap will begin to flow. It is the tallest living thing along this stretch of wild adjoining the right-of-way and second only to a large leaning Ash (Fraxinus americana) further down Front Street. The scarlet oak can afford to wait, and it does a service to the younger trees on the floor of this wild, allowing them a head-start. Is this accidental synergy, a strange coincidence? There is a wise seer in Concord whose art and mind and very life have evolved into an allegory in which accidents have stopped occuring and the major currents of life bring a lifting presence. She helped me to see these patterns outside my door. To read place as place remains to be read. The lillies stick their green tongues out of the earth this week. Renewal.

And it is refreshing against the memories I still cannot expel completely. H.E., for example, innoccuous enough, or so you would think. First a smokescreen: Standing in the doorway to my room, telling about things removed from his real work, such as it was. "I do not know who is writing such bad things about good people," he said, "but I think they think it is me." I knew nothing of the things he told me, and wondered why he protested so much. Then later he stood in my doorway and told me he had lied about the first thing. As if I had brought it up. As if I some how deserved to be implicated in his whole kindergarten scheme. You see, it was not that he had written bad things about good people. Who cares, right? It was the intentional charade he drew me into to make it seem like it was something else well before the proverbial what not hit the proverbial thingy. As if I were there to be manipulated in his bad manners. With the exposure of the lie, the whole house of cards tumbled down. This was not some one who valued other people's minds or work or concerns. This was not someone who took the real stuff of life very seriously. There were no principles in this person's motives, no desire to engage the world and leave it better than they had found it. No. There was just malice and jealousy and manipulation. And you may be saying to yourself, well, so what? Lots of people are like that. And they are.

"Our age is retrospective," Emerson wrote. The Scarlet Oak remembers.

Spring Song

The cold weather, freezing nights and brisk days, came just in time for spring. Seasons out of order. Life out of rhythm. A long debate about the value of human beings in environmental politics has convinced me not to trust those who call themselves "deep ecologists." Not because I do not think paying close attention to nature will help us grow a better society, but because after the definition comes a rigid dogma that does not seem to allow humans the liberty to be nature too. Human rights are violated the world over, and these do not even show up on the radar. I wonder, with a philosophy like that, who precisely they believe will be following them at the end of the day? Politics requires people. Deep ecology seems to loathe them. I don't get it and never will.

Spring came yesterday without breaking the freezing mark. Today again, the light is spring, the angles are spring, the season 'looks' right, but the chill air takes too long to heat up and seems to lurk longer into the day than it should. Global fluctuations winding perilously out of sync with the usual order of things. In the 19th century, geologists bickered over the definition of geological history as one defined by cataclysmic change or one defined by gradual change. They settled on the latter, though holding the former close enough to remind us that these were part too. Sometimes, everything suddenly spirals very quickly into something else. A plate slips and ruptures, a flow of water is stopped, the temperature stays at just the right level for just the wrong period of time. A woman once wrote a powerful book about this season, spring. Worried that it may become silent, because of our hands.

What politics do we turn to when those with small power abuse it and those with big power grow more selfish by the day? Some turn selfish themselves, stealing what they can, pretending themselves without an awareness of how foolish they look. Justified by their own limited view. Others hide behind things, as best they can, trying not to catch the rebound of their mistakes. They use people, hurt people, take people's money, and impulsively pick battles with anyone who could help them. And, in the end, all their rear-guard action is all they have done for a decade. Nothing else. A house of cards. I know a story about a family of farmers who pretended to bake. But the bakery was always empty because they could not even discover how to turn the ovens on. And the farmers knew nothing of the farm, and the servants stole and lied and kept the owners in the dark. You can read all about it elsewhere in all of its precise and amusing detail, if you can find it.

Spring has sprung! Happy season!