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.