Living Deliberately

Florida Wild

2006-08-08T16:22:00.000-04:00

See you there.

Florida Wild

Terminal Ecology

2006-07-29T10:45:00.000-04:00

The end of the road. This road. These clover and daisies and oaks and ash, all of the familiar insects and spiders, rodents and farm animals. Everything left behind. Here where it belongs in the temperate zone of central New England. I watched thunder storms roll in last night, powerful, sky-blackening, cool air churing, rain exploding thunder making cells of disturbed air and water. I felt the heat of the afternoon sun standing ankle-deep in the water of Walden Pond. Felt its photons trace my skin as I made a breast stroke across the aqua-marine waters. It has become something. Perhaps it was always something. I said my utterings of gratitude to the diminutive French-Canadian recluse whose insistence on something true led to something real. And I dried my feet as wind turned up and people were called from the waters, an ominous thunder rumbling in the near distance, barely wavering your ear drum.

Roads not ending but forking. Dividing. The new one on sand covered limestone. These will not be the plants of my youth. This will be novelty at every turn. Unexpected and much to learn. Florida lies the future.

May it meet me well.

Shrub

2006-06-09T13:46:00.000-04:00

This northern white cedar (Thuja occidentalis) has scale-like leaves that emerge from inside the previous leaf; one leaf erupting right out of the next, no discernible stem. Underneath the surface, a living tissue connects leaf to leaf and, layer after layer, it eventually builds wood. You can see the effect of the process here. An unfolding has occurred. Rumor has it that this species of tree was the first North American tree species to cross the Atlantic to Europe, to Paris to be precise, in 1536; un arbre à feuilles persistantes des colonies. This one hand-picked and planted on this fine corner of Earth finds itself too far to the south, out of its ordinary range of temperatures and light, but it presses on. They are capable of living four centuries, although I must confess my doubts to the ability of this one to do so - not where it is, not with so many forces lined up against it. The resinous tissues is highly acidic, filled with citric acid, vitamin C, a fact that saved many a sailor and malnourished colonist from scurvey. Given the latin title Arborvitae, tree of life, for its miraculous qualities. This one bears the weight of snow in winter and suffers scalding sun for half the day in summer; but persistently and ever so slowly it presses itself out into the world changing the very nature of life.

It is only a half turn from this delightful plant to the horrifying scenes of bloodthirsty revenge. We murder and call it justice, then we taunt the world by hanging the dead corpse from every television, newspaper, and web page to be found. The self-assured Secretary used the word "medieval" as he bragged about his "hunt and kill" (as if 500 pound bombs have anything to do with hunting) and in those squinting lying manipulating eyes of his I see he knew he meant himself. He has done the math, though, we cannot catch him before his earthly time is up. Hard to picture, despicable. And the shame piles up, leaf emerging from leaf, solidifying into wood, until we have built a structure out of our very failings. Despair.

Morphology

2006-06-04T17:00:00.000-04:00

One could call it genius. This understory oak shrub (is it black or scarlet? Quercus unsertanus) whose leaf profile is lost to the plant's own need to capture as much sunlight as is oakenly possible. A wide net, they say. This morphological tendency is most pronounced in the oak. It seemingly goes against reason, does it not? If there is less of something to have, most organisms respond by shrinking their needs, whether by force or by choice. This oak here across the right-of-way, nestled in the little patch of untrammeled ground between the road surface and the neighbors' yard, has decided it won't abide by those principles. As if principles alone ruled the world, it seems to me to say. If so, no doubt, this oak would have long ago died. But principles, it seems, are difficult to stick to something so lively as the wild. Principles of conservation are vital in a state of scarcity. But sunlight is abundant beyond imagination, even in the understory. Given the freedom, life expresses life. Circumstances change and life changes with them, somehow. This is not to justify unwarranted destruction or intentional rampage. It is to recenter the critique.

Stories of continued carnage lead the headlines every day. Worse than Vietnam in it that it is now today this minute. And worse in that it has somehow muted what used to be a well-developed sense of decency. May we be like oaks in the understory, our indistinguishable leaves powering a healthy set of roots, awaiting the toppling of the dying maple overhead. These days will end. We can be sure.

Context

2006-06-01T10:39:00.000-04:00

This redcurrant sprout (Ribes rubrum) stands out amongst the other species of plant life populating the strip of land across the right of way. There are maples sprouting here, too, but despite its similar appearance, this redcurrent sprout is not one. The lobes are too rounded. It is distinguishable from the flowering weeds (forgive the term) by its more complex leaf structure; it has sprouted a leaf that reveals that its plant will produce wood, something in its glossy heartiness, as compared to the more soft and fragile hairy leaves all around it. Redcurrants are a shrubby plant that have adapted across the temperate zone in the northern hemisphere, but not the southern. Mi esposa no los conoce antes estas viviendo aca, por ejemplo. They produce a a bitter fruit full of acerbic acid and they are delicious in a cold chicken salad, as I learned. These sprouts prove the tenacity of life, the miracle of the living context. Last July I was charged with assembling a meal entirely out of locally grown and raised food; it had to have come from less than 50 miles. I needed flavor for my salad and something to baste the chicken when I barbequed. Redcurrants, growing in clumps in the backyard of a friend in the next town, gave me the help I needed. I picked a bucketful and brought them home and pressed most of them through a wire mesh, leaving behind a pile of skins and seeds. I deposited the so-called waste material in amongst the grasses here, and this spring, without hesitation, they have taken root, sprouted, carried my own energy and life force back into the history of this little strip of land across the right-of-way. There are raspberries (Rubus idaeus) growing further along the right-of-way that, no doubt I now realize, have a similar history. Our lives are all connected in our landscapes, human hands and thoughts and natural growth and expressions. Nothing escapes context.

Perhaps among all other failures of the present travesty of politics is this last little nugget. The pre-modernist notion that one people or state or ruler or class can somehow transcend context, ignore discussion, and fail to behave with diplomacy should have died with Napoleon. Yet here we wallow, hoping for the warming daylight of a political spring to sprout new seeds from the waste of last year's dinner party.

On April 17, 2006 I predicted a tapestry of maple, grape and choke cherry would block the view of my neighbors' house, and them, me and mine. Alas, the predicted future has arrived. Am I now a fortune teller? How did I possibly see the future so clearly? And, before snickering too much at what sound like facetious questions, ponder this: Can these 'common sense' predictions help us to see something about the essence of chaos and order, something about where each of them reside?

Fern

2006-05-22T14:39:00.000-04:00

It is an old plant. Not this one. This one is not very old, but its genes are. Its genetic code and its anatomical expression - genotype and phenotype - are older than anything that flowers. Flowering plants appeared in the Mesozoic period, about 150 million years ago, along with small mammals, birds, and the mighty dinosaur. The genetic code for ferns was old then; this unfurling had been witnessed by untold life forms for an eternity before the dinosaurs and proto-rodents nibbled on its unrolling fronds. They had grown into trees once, an initial dominance, the age of the fern, in the Pennsylvanian epoch. They had grown into forests and developed seed bearing species. Their work of filling out the various ecological niches has come back to haunt our present in this: Their carbon-catching processes, the photosynthesis of a sun shining bright 300 million years ago, now fuels our unquenchable thirst for energy today. They are coal and oil - their bones and cells, the work they did - the carbon caught rebound with oxygen and sent aloft. These fern, here in my yard, evolved, they say, from a small group that survived their intial dominance. They retreated from seeds, opting to stick with spores. And as its forefathers and mothers have done for eons, these fronds produced sporangia this past week, the spore capsules that carry its code into a new generation. The recent rains seem to have stimulted the process. The heavy grey leaves, they are covered. The sporangia are soft and spongy to the touch; their spores will be carried across the yard, perhaps, or to the edge of the Mill Pond. It is the ability of living things to adapt in their own time that gives some species a staying power, or so says a book that I am reading. Complexity and variability within stable bounds. Life.

Some folks smell victory at this point. A turning political tide. The end of this neo-liberal travesty called the first six years of the 21st century. I say they still have a trick or two up their sleeves. These are not idle men when it comes to power. Their stakes are different than ours, this is a certainty. But perhaps the recent rains have stimulated spores of other sorts, seeds of democratic sensibility and civic engagement. May we seek the persistence of the delicate fern and adapt where necessary when we have overreached. Enough with the distractions. Turn off the television. Go witness life.

Construct

2006-04-17T09:06:00.000-04:00

This is the last view through these woody sticks this year. In less than two weeks, a solid wall of green leafy matter will fill in every blank. The fence and the house and the rest of my neighbor's yard will vanish behind a tapestry of grape leaves and maple leaves, choke cherry and raspberry. In the mean time, I can watch the flowers on the dog wood swell and bloom and drop like spring snow onto the ground around the tree. Another pink bush, I do not know the name, flowers as well. These will finish their work before the leaves have come. The proximity of houses will then disappear. Each of us will have more privacy in spring and summer. But I do not mind my neighbors in the way that they seem to mind me. Is it the fear of loss that attaches itself to every item they have stuffed into their house? The still uncertain relationship that they themselves have with that inner voice, and such uncertainty causing a habitual dislike of exterior voices - lest they somehow foul the nest, as it were. These might be insulting thoughts, could they be heard. Or they might be that essential love we are all missing these days. Too much may overwhelm, not enough does other harm. And it is not even the abstract to which I appeal. I have thought and pondered and wondered with some ferocity this spring season. I will not accept an idle excuse. We are all blessed with eyes and all given the same quotient of reason and wildness. Childhood, from which so many have still not emerged, is merely a luxury of abundance that trains us to want even more. We are quite on track - quite on this track - with these unfettered appetites. But the best individual is the one who recognizes the whole and acts with dignity. We do not love our neighbors because at bottom, we are ashamed. Either they are with us in a superficial skate across the physicality of life and only use language as a toy to keep the truth at bay, or we fear they know our secret. Silence draws the conscience and the conscience tells no lies. So, go ye brave cells of maple and grape, of choke cherry and raspberry, cover these open spaces with your perfectly tuned photon collectors, fill our eyes with the joy of life, let us forget these too grounded thoughts, too much like wild grape vines choking a pine sapling by the edge of a campground road.

And speaking of choking. It is a mad waving of hands and a pointing of fingers as the reprehensible men who will stand trial one day for war crimes they committed slowly back toward the door hoping to make a successful departure. There are words that emerge to define a travesty, sometimes they become associated with a single name. These devastating early days of the 21st century are no doubt what we will mean when we use the insult "bush" in the not too distant future.

Azucena

2006-03-31T10:59:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-27T08:28:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-21T08:45:00.000-05:00

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!

Modern Marvels

2006-02-24T14:00:00.000-05:00

This carpet moss (Mnium hornum) is living on the moist ground at the edge of my yard, the mosses are an incredibly persistent life form. They are rootless organisms - having only a single celled rhyzoid to embrace the earth and absorb water - yet they are formed to place, not made to move, but to flourish. Their vitality comes from a resilience of marvellous proportions. Mosses can rebound from near desiccation and flourish anew. Mosses are the primary land plant. Their story is astounding, when you think of it. Some 500 million years ago, this gaggle of cooperating cells, this self-replicating system, found a way to flourish where water had evaporated. (Life has that persistence.) How many tries before it got it right? Enough to get it right, if Darwin and Mendel are correct. These relics flourish now in my yard, glowing green, alive in honest worship of their god the sun. Male and female in successive generations. This life form in all its stories represents the memory of a certain kind of living momentum so undeniably different from the momentum of empty space that consciousness called it holy, ancient philosphers explained it as sacred. And I would argue that no engineering course at MIT or management course at the Harvard Business School or philosophy course at the New School for Social Research can possibly replicate the profound insistence of self-organizing material. That's what Thoreau discovered, I think. We take it for granted. He pointed that out as well.

The question is: This loss of notice, this failure to be aware, can it really harm us? Because those would amount to laughable claims in many books. The very idea that the wild somehow feeds us beyond our pragmatic needs and abundant wants has been rendered mute through shaming mechanisms and misdirection. So why, really, could it possibly matter whether we stare down a flowering apple tree or stare at a glowing screen, what possible imprints could the visible world have upon our imagination. I mean, come on. It is just stuff that we look at, it is not thought itself. Is it?

Luna

2006-02-20T16:46:00.000-05:00

The story goes that some thing very large slammed into the side of the rocky boiling mass of gas and magma that was the Earth four and a half billion years ago. A cosmic fender bender. The resulting projectile was flung out into space, to the outer reaches of a gravity field, and locked into a perpetual dance. This chunk of rock marks our seasons and has represented the principle of eternal return in all of our mythic tales and scared texts. It draws the tides, a fundmental pre-condition of life evolving, and it is said to draw our moods as well. It's reflection of sunlight has projected earthward since the deepest time. Dinosaurs and mammoths saw the same. Who else has counted its cycles, its waxing and waning, and found measures that hold more than personal interest. What does it mean to look upon a vision looked upon for so long by everything that can look? Why does the moon enchant me so? It's persistence, perhaps. The lesson it holds. What other things mark time now that resulted merely from accidental encounter? How else have cosmic accidents come to measure the rhythm of my own time? Organic time moves in one direction and yet its effects linger forever. Each thing, just the history of some other set of things. We are not islands, separated from others by a gaping sea and immeasurable space; space is the illusion of the quanta. We are all-too-crowded inside a fishbowl comprised of our own detritus. In this case, which seems to be the case, be sure to make what you would like to see. For you will sit amongst it for eternity.

Carnage making carnage, violence making violence. We have pushed it and its echoes wave all around. The means are all we have. And that is the ultimate tragedy here.

Snow shadows

2006-02-18T11:15:00.000-05:00

What a joy, this life. The snow fell with a fury for twenty-four hours. It layered everything, gently, lovingly. The post-modernists would say this sense of love is nothing but my own creation, my own projection out onto the world, a set of values generated only in me. Out there, they say, no love. No meaning at all. Well...perhaps in your corners, I retort. But I see this snow, I watched it fall. It evoked something that was not clear to me without it. With it, I think I have found clarity, I find some tangibility to the thought and emotion that previously had no form. Nature makes the metaphor for our thoughts, at the very least, does it not? This snow here, the shadows, they represent as well as just exist; if you turn your head sideways, you can see the dragonfly made by the oak sapling; you can squint and see the blues of life giving water and shadows of form that could be mountains not just crystals of snow. There are things to notice - more than we ever see in fact. And the associations with this image here trickle out into the world of metaphysics. It forces you to question the basis of your truth, of what you think you know. Think on this: If what I see associates to me, then am I truly that? Does that refer to me? My ego says it must, but what, in fact, if it doesn't and I just think it does? What then? Can I ever really know? We face the ever changing realities of time unfolding, and we desperately try to stick elements of higher consistency onto the flux. Certitude is contingent. Process is everything. Care is tantamount. Joy is a must. What a joy this life, what a loving landscape.

This truth is lost, of course, on the ideologues and power mongerers (and others with even less to contribute). They got there, somehow, suckered the masses. Smoke and mirrors. But even that is fading now. One year, two years, three, four, the same lies spread thinner and thinner and thinner, the outcasts growing in number. Just as the gentle snow of winter is blown into spring torrents, the careful love of genuine humanity always trumps grasping narcissism. David slew Goliath, don't forget. Without peace, time is not your friend.

Just Ice

2006-02-03T11:52:00.000-05:00

It is not nearly far enough into the new year for the spring rains and swollen rivers occuring all around us. One anticipates cold this time of year, not arms of snow melting in the yard. In New England, we expect snow to stay around in the winter. We expect layers. This precipitation today, for example, seems like it should have been another layer. A fluffy dusting of fresh powder. The sort of blanket of ice that Thoreau would have loved to have wandered in, detecting the lives that lived beside him in the forest and meadows of Concord, their footprints in the piles of crystaline water freshly fallen the day before. He saw intelligence in the paths of their footsteps. We cannot even see the footsteps today. Sadly, in both literal and figurative senses, we do not detect the lives that are around us lived. We cannot find metaphorical bridges or literal tropes to gap the gaping divide. We watch the snow wash away from our yards, a snow that barely held on after the previous snow had melted, and the one before that. This warming cycle is proximate, but part, no doubt, of the random changes that are expected under the soup of carbon dioxide that we now live. And so, neither true space nor genuine time mean anything to us any more. Each moment a fleeting one, a desperate lunge into the next, a blinding certainty. This snow here, for example, this natural last embankment in the middle of my yard, jumped up to me as a fine image of global warming, a picture of its implications. But my memory reminded me that this curvature of snow is something else as well. It exists as the final remnant of a family of snowmen built up by my family and I in full knowledge that that forces of human nature would bring them down again. They were chopped to bits by middle and high school boys, all muscle and hormones and energy and welcoming the opportunities to use them. This is the last remnant of that opportunity given to them that day and taken up predictably and with a fury out of proportion to the harm the snowmen had done to any one of them. Their force against the snow compacted the crystals making them more difficult to wash away. Their fury left this rain-resistant pile, now lying here in my yard as a reminder, a material memory of the boys' muscle power, their physical emotions manifest.

We understand the world too imperfectly to move with the sort of certainty our nation state has determined to move with. We have harnessed force with the utmost precision and toward too many ends to conclude our ambitions have been soley evil, but we have never learned the table manners of the gods. "Our whole life is startlingly moral," Thoreau reminds us in the "Higher Laws" chapter of Walden. "There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails." Force and power as ends in themselves cannot help but bring despair, misery, and continued death. We know better than these days have shown of us. We could do better if we chose to try.

Hydrogen Twice Oxygen

2006-01-25T12:16:00.000-05:00

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

2006-01-12T15:53:00.000-05:00

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

2006-01-07T22:56:00.000-05:00

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.

DECEMBER 31, 2005

2005-12-31T14:20:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-21T08:24:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-10T17:27:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-08T16:19:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-04T16:05:00.000-05:00

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.

Fogs

2005-11-28T09:23:00.000-05:00

This one evokes the colors of holiday cheer. Or, at least, it evokes the color of cranberries, that bitter fruit (Vaccinium macrocarpon) reputed to be highest in anti-oxidants and a good source of vitamin c (citric acid). Also, how shall we say, known as a fine source of regularity. But these are not cranberries, merely their color. This maroonish red is not so uncommon in nature that it doesn't appear in tree leafs and flowers and fruit and plant matter. Here, as a variant of clover (Lespedeza ...), it is really the patterns of stem and stalk I was after. The structure holding up the leaf and flower. Its straight angularity and the many angles covered, plus the odd focus on the background, where galaxies of leaves cluster together without worry. Everything is reducible to something, but that being so doesn't mean the reduction is always more true than the whole. Water being water being three atoms in a molecule, is that molecule, not its pieces when it is water. How tight its bond? It requires the energy of the sun to break it. The water in some structures can be mineralized into silcates. This petrified wood had such an existence. What is permanent is form, substance changes, but only slightly. Wood become rock. Which is the truth here? Precisely why the cranberry stalks and leaves led me to pondering water and oxygen and reducibility can never be known, but once the can was opened, we knew the worms would crawl.

Everything is once again nudged into a slow spin, like the mass of planets, but movable. The half-truths are massaged, the masses are led. What was once firm is negotiable; anything to save his presidency. They can convince themselves that this is their intended end-game, but we know better. And I shudder at the deaths still to come in the blinding wake of their ill-conceived war and war-like ways. The comfort of turning tides only heightens the anticipation of possible futures yet unspoken. What fools we are, Americans. What foolish myths we follow, what foolish days we lead.

sNow

2005-11-25T20:25:00.000-05:00

The first snow to stick fell last night in southern New England. A low pressure system over the Great Lakes pumped spiral waves of wafting clouds into frigid air. The crystalized water must have drifted for hours, judging by the depth. It was followed today by cold sunny weather. Half-melt everywhere. Winter bit this season during Thanksgiving, it came biting. And this is only the first. Today in the journal Science we learned that the past 600,000 years of heating and cooling - a six mile deep record of ice in Antarctica - shows no atmosphere with as much CO2 and methane as ours has today. Low pressure over the Great Lakes comes from the slow release of the excess heat they receive from the greenhouse gas reflection effect. Global warming expresses itself first and foremost as warmer water. As a result, there's energy out there for more than one storm this season, and they expect they'll be heavy ones. In fact, the Lakes have been getting warmer for years. Each summer for decades, the surface temperatures are quite high. This year, the highest they have been in five years by June. The rule of gathering suggests this could only happen if heat was already stored below. The Great Lakes are one of two great storm engines for New York, New England and the Atlantic Provinces. This past summer was the most active hurricane season on record, and the Gulf States of the United States and Mexico were host to the strongest hurricane ever recorded, as well as the fourth and sixth strongest ever (Katrina, by the way, was #6 of all time). This winter, we'll be host to the product of warm Great Lakes weather systems. Already, the temperatures are above normal. And let me just quote from the article to the right, from WGN Chicago, "Explosive destabilization of the atmospere is likely to occur when Arctic air sweeps over the warm waters." The Lakes haven't been this hot in November for more than a decade, and that year was a record. Ironically, one of the side effects of global warming is stronger winter storms. What does climate change look like? Watch this winter in a western hemisphere near you.

On a brighter note, George Bush hung out in Crawford and had a happy Thankgiving with about 100 friends who want him to bring all the troop home from Iraq now. He's bound to listen... What kinds of deals are being smoothed over this holiday season? Who will show whom good will and generosity and who will be left out to dry? In the schism between the Thanksgiving break and re-adjournment next year, they are scheming up new good lies, I'm certain, and no doubt we'll hear again about "re-writing history" from the lips of men who carve rhetoric, and graft, for a living. But this time, I hope, in the blinding days of January, we will know what we are looking at, and responding as every good democracy should, slow, in gathering waves of disgust, until the critical mass of revulsion sends the criminal packing to squander other fields in other ways on other people's time. This is my holiday wish.

The Weeks

2005-11-23T09:15:00.000-05:00

It's a curious thing, these seasons. Logic is subtle in them. When the sun is lowest, these next eight weeks from now until mid-January, the darkest, shortest of the year, the air begins getting cold and ends getting colder. Halfway through these weeks, the solstice will harken winter, but it will also bring on longer days, higher angles, more radiation and heat to be gathered. Yet, the days will get colder. More light, more heat, colder air. Into the next season, it will be the same. The hottest days follow the summer solstice, when the daylight is longest. There is a rule underlying this fact, the subtle logic of nature. There is always a gathering before a change. Roots gather energy and thrust it into the tree, buds gather energy and suddenly unfold into leaves. The factors, the variables, arrange themselves to favor new conditions well before those new conditions come about. Winter arrives before winter arrives, and so on through spring and summer and autumn again. Waves, not pistons. Gradients, not planes. The chopping up of each of these gradients and eventualities into measured time and measured seasons cannot remove their true subtlety; indeed, the chopping up provides the very standard against which to realize the intricate mosaic of constant change that reality presents. We are carvers of time and space, butchers of the universal dance, without which, the rest of our systems would falter.

They are still finding bodies in New Orleans. Human carnage in Iraq. 150,000 will be homeless across 51 states as of December 1st merely by dint of having been poor and housed in New Orleans. 10,000 unemployed a year who once worked for GM. More political crimes and indictments. George W. has put on that grimace he wore all of last year pretending he was in charge and morally aghast that anyone anyone would question his leadership. These are what post-modernists call liminal days and weeks, we stand on both sides of a boundary, everything is in flux. Old strategies are deployed, or, strategies that were once new or didn't seem like strategies suddenly become old; they are on one side, we are on the other. Liminal. A merry Thanksgiving to the imperialists, who need not wait.

End Game

2005-11-21T09:44:00.000-05:00

There's a low slant to the sun now. It's rays cut into my livingroom windows first thing in the morning, as it only does during the three months of winter light. It comes early, nothing but empty branches between it and the horizon, low angles of light, even at noon. I can feel the heat ricocheting off the upper troposphere and back out into space. The plants don't capture it either. The miracle of photosynthesis has gone south for the season. Except in the hearty lawn grass that has recovered after fall rains and re-colonized the spaces where crab grass grew during summer months. Crab grass grows agrressively, but it dies on the first frost. This thin blue grass or stem or some such continues using the little bit of sun it gets and has no fear of frost. The days are pleasant now, nights are cold, but mild days. Last November, it was the same. Last December it snowed as if the Pleistocene had never ended. Ten more days of hurricane season, then we'll see what happens next this year. The warmer seasons present so much, so many creatures and living things, so much to see and notice. But the colder days seem cause for reflection. From a vibrant wild world outside to a vibrant wild inner life. Adieu to the warmer seasons, Buenos dias, mis pensandos.

Killing Watch the video at this link. They are faltering and disintegrating in Washington, DC., scrambling to stay one step ahead of the falling dominoes, but as I have always maintained, the truth will eventually rise. What is true, what are facts, what has been done, cannot be concealed forever, by anyone. These are uncertain days now, as hogs at the trough learn their meal has ended. Into the schisms or disintegration, there will no doubt be more violence, more killings, senseless acts of senseless men. But the submersion of reality has ended. What 56 million of us knew and 45 million others decided not to notice, has now become plain for everyone. In terms of sheer cash money, perhaps the most corrupt five years in the history of this state called united. In terms of culture, perhaps the most corrupted quarter century of ideas ever to find political voice in a democracy. And in terms of habitat, perhaps the most destructive century witnessed since the asteroid took out the dinosaurs. Scorching Iraqi civilians with flaming phosophorous, committing the "massive killing" that was Falluja, is the last desperate expression of this desperate philosophy promulgated by these greedy evil men. It has lost traction and now we face its messy retreat. Brace yourselves.

Detritus

2005-11-13T07:47:00.000-05:00

The leaves of the scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea) have come to dominate the piles of dead leaves around the yard. This species, yet another common tree of the region, although in its northernmost habitat here, is partial to poor sandy upland soils; it must be in heaven in the ground where it grows across the right-of-way. This is the fastest growing of the oaks, and, so says the experts, shoots quickly up into the air for 20 years before it reaches maturity and begins to drop seed. It cannot stand shade, so if it does not attain canopy status, it will not survive. The sprouts around its base are not scarlet oak, but some other variety of the same species. Waiting. The tree that dropped these leaves is probably 40 years old and has reached about half its full potential height. It held its leaves until just before the killing frost and then dropped them, as most trees tend to, in a sudden fall - over the course of several hours one morning, they simply drifted off the branches like snowflakes and landed on our driveway. This pile will be pressed and fed into our composter where it will become soil next year or the year after. Our neighbors send their lawn piles away in large brown bags where someone else will make soil and sell it back to them. We hold ours and cook it ourselves. The trees always cooperate, whatever the species.

Cut light and cold air pressing down from the Arctic. We all need to sleep more. The trees go dormant. All but the heartiest of green plants have withered and retreated for the season. No bird song at sunrise, but for the complaining crow and occassional migrating flock of geese. The transitions are everywhere, quietude is upon us. Ironically, at this onset of winter, when life takes a break and waits for the light of January, the political winds are blowing spring-like. Over weeks now, as if a a pile of festering swamp-rot has been opened to the oxidizing processes of the open atmosphere, the gasses of corruption and ineptitude have wafted into the air. Beneath the swamp, we knew the rotting was taking place, but no one can ignore the stench of methane. Desperate grasps for the rhetorical high-ground seem laughable, now that the swamp is exposed. The methane of rot permeates every crevice. The match is on the flint. We enter fall delighted.

Sycamore-like

2005-11-07T09:33:00.000-05:00

The Norway maple (Acer platanoides) was brought here by Europeans to decorate their yards. One can understand the impulse. These trees grow rapidly and produce a dense folliage, delicate green leaves and an utterly delectable tangerine hued yellow fall color. They are also incredibly tolerant of all the atmopheric maladies accompanying modern life - smoke, pollution, automobile impact. The have a strong wood, narrow rings. It is rumored that Antonio Stradivarius made his famous violins out of this material, the little ice age of the 17th century contributing to even denser rings than ever in this popular European tree. Here in the United States, they escape from yards and streets and populate entire forests where they have been given a chance to thrive. I have seen them grow up the inside of apple trees and small bushes, twist against white oaks and scarlets. The trees in this photograph hug the boundary of two properties perpendicular to mine. These leaves conceal an entire house until fall and fall's rains remove them to the ground again. Here in New England, Norway maples, whose Latin name means 'like the sycamore' because its leaves are very similar, have not only escaped cultivation, they have established themselves, "naturalized," (and more) as they say. But the Norway maple is to native New England forests what the European was to Native American lifeways in the 17th century. The tree is classified as "invasive" because it does not share the space it comes to occupy, but, instead, uses its beautiful dense folliage to out-compete other native species, removing nutrients from the ground and shading out sunlight from above. Simplifying.

And so, riots and tornadoes and the threat of a flu pandemic and who wouldn't think these days are those last days of which it is written? Why not? You do not want to be one of those left behind, after the storm, do you? The trouble, of course, is that nothing more than ever happens is continuing to happen today, no more hurricanes or earthquakes or tornadoes or volcanoes. All of these are in statistical proportion to last year and the year before and even the year before that one. These are not the products of sudden change, these things did not just appear. Laws of averages apply. Gradual erosive politics, for example, lead to gradually erosive societies. CO2 builds in the atmosphere and gradually heat build-up takes place in our atmosphere. The trouble is neither the suddenness of it (for it is not sudden) nor its chronic presence (it has been here for some time), the trouble is that we have become, somehow, powerless in this system. It is not that we are being out-competed. It is that we are not even part of the competition at all. You will fill up with gasoline this week, turn on an electrical switch, open the refrigerator, flush a toilet. You have no choice. You have no alternatives, nor alternative skills. We need genuine alternatives, a new vision. Something countering the trend of Norway maples that sacrifice complexity for beauty.

Pioneers

2005-10-22T22:28:00.000-04:00

This red maple (Acer rubrum) has been sprouting out from underneath my front porch for two seasons now. Its seed could have come from any direction, as it is a common tree along sidewalks and in yards in this part of the country. Its brilliant red folliage makes it an attractive fall tree. It grows rapidly, a sign that it is a pioneer tree, accustomed to finding open fields and launching forests. But because it is a fast-grower, it has relatively soft and light wood. It doesn't make for sturdy furniture or flooring. Red maple is better used for hangers and other low stress applications. It's tannin was once used by native Americans as a dye, and, in desperate situations, red maple could be tapped for (teeny amounts of) sugar. This one invaded beneath the porch, poking through the sides and growing enough leaves to put down sturdy roots. I have considered transplanting it when I replace the porch next year, but that may be too much trouble for a common species like this one. It grows everywhere because it can thrive in a variety of conditions. It prefers wet or moist soils and large stands of this tree can be found in swamps, giving it one of its monikers, swamp maple. But it can also be found on upland and dry soils. In the lowland swamps, these trees turn in mid-August. This one is just beginning to turn now. It's persistence has endeared it to me and it will survive another season.

The threads of the conservative coalition's cloth is giving out at the seams and in its very weave. Yet, still, we wait for the emergence of a new dialogue. Some have argued that all the appearances of power are just that, appearances. The dirty secret of modernity, they argue, is failure. Persistent, regular, unavoidable, anticipatable, failure. Power did not derive from rational planning, it was usurped from ordinary people, such that they ever had it, by extraordinary institutions of private wealth and gain. These are merely its latest days. We have moments now and again, cracks, like you might find in fault zone rocks, openings under the porches where something else more common might send out a shoot and flourish in the sun, pressing down roots into moist soil and fill. We need the red maple of democracy to sprout. The miracle of seeds.

Builders

2005-10-12T13:21:00.000-04:00

These two earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris) jumped into my basement when I opened the door to the yard this morning. The common night crawler, a favorite for fishmen the world over, is a burrowing worm. It can dig up to eight feet down into the earth, where it lives in the day, digesting organic matter consumed on the surface the night before. At night, this anecic earthworm crawls to the surface and nibbles on the dead grass and leaf litter and whatever else it can find, converting cells and fiber into small particles of soil - you've seen the piles in your yard. night crawlers bring air and water to the subsurface through their worm holes, which are held open by a hardened mucus secreted by the worm when they burrow. Too much water, or an abundance, floods these busy creatures out of the depths and to the surface in daylight, to my back door, where they become disoriented and lost. Worm watchers tell me that worms, without eyes or a nose, without fingers or toes, can find their way back to their specific worm hole after any given night of leaf consumption. More rain than usual and all bets are off. Without worms, soils grow slower, if at all. Without soils, no agriculture. You can follow the logic from there. The worm is a muscle surrounding a digestive tract, mostly protein to the hungry robin. I released these individuals back into the yard. They both tried to twist away from my fingers when I reached for them on the steps. They did not realize that I was trying to help. They may not find their original homes, but they can build others, improving my soils and feeding the birds that live in my neighborhood.

In one of our many bastardizations of metaphor, a lowly, sneeky, back-biting individual is called a worm. I have heard this word used to describe our president. But worms deserve better respect than that. "They like to rape babies," a medicine man once said of the first family extended. "Everyone in Texas knows that." To this day, I do not know if the charge was meant literally or metaphorically, but I do know these worms would not cause the wreckage being caused by this Bush. I know that the political moment of Katrina and New Orleans has passed and no-bid contracts and no worker protection requirements and an opening of the field to profit-makers has taken place on the ground. Republicans are using the potential dialogue about race and poverty to further eviscerate government aid. Shameless. I know that a paper writing process in Iraq somehow trying to replicate our own 18th-century state-making moment (presided over by slaveholders, remember), a process that forgets how steeped in the naive idealism of Enlightenment-era political science the proceedings in Philapdelphia were, has descended into a laughable political process and a bloody tragedy in the streets. Our imperialism has replaced tyranny with tyranny, causing continued killings and heinous deaths where too much killing and death have become part and parcel, like a trip to the market for most of us. Shameful. Perhaps, when looked at from the right angle, 'worm' could work. He has burrowed deep into the subsoils of our most cherished vows and convinctions and lined his hole with mucus, one big muscle surrounding a digestive tract, no sight, smell, and only simple spontaneous reactions to external stimlulation. If only robins came large enough.

Prey

2005-10-07T10:37:00.000-04:00

This grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) lives in a nest in the Norway spruce (Picea abies) tree at the corner of the yard. She or he summered in the trees next to the Mill Pond, but has moved back to the vicinity of my yard since August when the sunflowers and watermelon started coming in. This one got both of the backyard sunflowers and about an eighth of one of the front yard sunflowers. It ate an entire watermelon and took bites out of the zuchinni and gourd (it didn't like either squash). It has also buried and stored hundreds of nuts around the neighborhood. I see it wander across the right of way find a spot on the ground, dig a few inches down and pull out a well seasoned nut. It will be busy restoring in the next following weeks. There is an enormous white oak just to the south of us and a scarlet oak growing up over the right-of-way outside my kitchen door. This squirrel has no doubt planted more of both across this little landscape. It eats only fruits and nuts, only has conflicts with woodpeckers, whose hollowed homes it likes to steal, yet it must fear for its life at the screetch of the red tailed hawk. As if to punctuate this point, three hawks glided overhead as I wrote those lines, battling with each other aggressively for air space, they circled and circled, slowly downstream, and the squirrel was suddenly absent. I have mixed emotions for this gray squirrel. I have cursed him or her for shredding a neighbor's red nylon scarf and throwing pieces in the Norway spruce. I have wished her or him harm after finding broken sunflower plants and scattered seed shells. I finally just had to laugh when I found the hollowed out watermelon in the front yard raised beds. This squirrel is at home in my yard, my home is in its yard, what else would I expect? This species is the most common of all wildlife species in eastern North America, it is the only wild critter that just about everyone has seen. It has adjusted to our presence, populated our parks, and inhabited our borderlands.

Its large numbers and wide habitat range makes it the common prey of hawk and coyote and feral dog, even kingfisher will try for one. It is a well-fed and comfortable species. Is my ambivalence toward it something akin to my ambivalence toward many of the other signatures of modernism? I do not deny the creature its right to live, and I feel a tinge of sorrow at the kill-site whenever the hawks get the best of it, I even grudgingly respect its work ethic, memory, and good planning. I like this particular individual, having watched it for the full cycle of seasons. But the bigger picture drawn by the lack of diversity among our backyard wildlife that is embodied and represented by this image of this individual gray squirrel, whose species is known to all and whose shape is familiar to everyone, is disheartening. There are many birds, there are many plants, but there are not too very many wild mammals bigger than this one in our immediate and every day experience, most of us. It must lead to an undernourished imagination, eventually, losing this vital segment of experienced life. Possibly it could lead one to assert fantastical explanations and justifications where white ash (Fraxinus americana) has been growing strong for centuries, to contend debate against one's own mirror image.

Baseball

2005-10-06T08:08:00.000-04:00

This white ash (Fraxinus americana) has begun its colorful turn - purplish and yellow, as if gleeming. This one is a sapling compared to the 50 foot giant in my neighbor's yard that no doubt seeded it. The white ash is known in the Carolinas as "autumn purple." Its summer leaves are attractive as well, a silvery green, pinnately compound leaf cluster. But the white ash is perhaps best loved for its wood. White ash has a very strong resistence to stress (it doesn't break easily). It is, however, at the same time relatively, even absolutely, light weight. Strong and light, white ash is the favored wood for baseball bats and hockey sticks and other wooden sports equipment. You could make dozens upon dozens of baseball bats out of the giant mother tree in front of my neighbor's house. The one pictured here will need another century to reach those heights, and much more canopy space before it is done. White ash have five to nine leaves per pinnate cluster, but usually produce seven. The bark gets furrowed and thick as the tree gets older and it seems to continue to produce leaves and branches even when it has stopped adding any height. The oldest white ash in my community, planted along with the factories more than a century ago, have large dead branches reaching into the air at their tops and their living branches grow in thickets below, producing and storing energy in ancient roots for the season ahead. The old trees are symbols of persistence. The one pictured here turns for its fiteenth or twentieth time, grown in the tangle of neglected land between properties, preparing for winter. White ash lose their lower branches as they grow, leaving behind a thick knot-free trunk. They are favored in cultivated yards for their speckled shade, and favored by all birds in this neighborhood for the perches provided by the many many branches they grow.

I have looked at the giant white ash a hundred times since first setting eyes on them more than a year ago, but today when I noticed that this one on my right-of-way was turning this beautiful purple color and I realized that purple in fall was one of its defining characteristics and I looked up into the upper reaches of the giants and saw the same purple I realized that several large trees I knew were the same species. We can often be surrounded by concrete things like the white ash giants, and we can even notice these things in passing, and still never really know what they are. But they are not not there, even if not noticed by us. The giant trees, for instance, grew for more than a century before I was even born, my noticing them today did not bring them into existence. Facts and truth, I think, are the same way. They grow sturdy edifices, reach against gravity into the air, and persist beyond their years. They can be denied or go unnoticed, but they cannot be made not there. This is one of those rules that gives me solace in these days of Bush.

Predators

2005-10-02T13:27:00.000-04:00

This pair of red tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) lazily glided figure eights across the sky above my head this morning. They follow the currents of the Assabet River, grazing meadows for prey. Once a month or so they find themselves sweeping over the Mill Pond and our neighborhood. I heard them from inside, that distinctive screetch (click on the title "Predators" to hear it). Is that a teradactyl outside? It has been used for movie birds, hawks and eagles, their voice. The oldest sayings recommend paying fine attention to the content of your thoughts when presented with an eagle or hawk. They are bearers of the necessity to reflect. What was I thinking this fine autumn morning with the sun alone in the blue sky and the cold air of overnight quickly warmed when these graceful birds wafted overhead? How were the contents of my thoughts as the screetch pierced my brain with its unusual cadence? They swept overhead in wide circles, in opposite directions, apart, together, apart, together, moving downstream with the pace of a stroller or saunterer. I heard them screetch. I was noting the joys of community in my journal before I ran outside.

The red tail hunts birds, among other prey. The unlucky victims, so say the experts, are beheaded before being consumed whole. The hawks' screetch scares up the ground critters and, with eyesight that can find a mouse at 100 feet, they usually stay well fed. A kill site is bloody, scarred land, full of fur clumps or feathers, claw marks, and undigestible internal organs. Behind the graceful beauty of the hawk is a cold calculus. They must eat, and feed their hungry young. This bloody claw disturbed Darwin and came to symbolize the ugly underside of natural selection, the appalling potential of natural impulses. I feel his pain as I reflect on the carnage left behind by a hawk's meal. But the hawk must eat. What precisely is our excuse? How much unnecessary death marks modernity and the supposed maturation of culture? What prices of incivility are paid beyond the needed costs? The problem is not the existence of bloody claws, but the excessive bloodiness by which we make our every day. No grace, or figure eights, just brute strength exercised in the only way possible. The hawks watch for hours, they rest on currents of air, they take their time and only what they need.

House

2005-09-29T08:12:00.000-04:00

You can just barely see the legs of this common arachnid, known as the house spider (Achaearanea tepidariorum). I think this is a house spider. It is common across my yard, in every corner. Sticky silky webs with a hiding cone in the center. You can see this individual's former exo-skeleton in the foreground of the photograph. Everyone runs from spiders, but they are a beneficial addition to any garden. Only a few uncommon and easily identified spiders bite humans, most simply hunt insects and keep pests at bay. This one, like its cousin across the yard, has had to contend with squirrel droppings - seeds and husks from stolen vegetables in the neighborhood. The squirrels rest on the top of the post at the corner of the fence, thowing away what they don't want into the sticky corner web made by this corner-loving creature. The two objects in the lower part of this photograph are shells from sunflower seeds stolen from my sunflower plant that grew in the front yard this summer. Spiders are not insects. But they like to eat insects, and other spiders. They are hunters, all spiders are. They are like us in many ways. Solitary, protective of their nest eggs, clever and creative with their talents. They build their own homes, elaborately. There are other spiders in my yard besides this one. A garden spider built a large traditional spider's web between the wires running for electricity and those running for the telephone. I did not see it until a misting rain highlighted it with water droplets one morning. This one used to live by the gate latch, but its web was torn so many times by the opening of the door, it moved over here to the corner. Watch a spider some time. They know you are there. This spider knows my moves better than I do.

It is a rainy and stormy day in metro-west Massachusetts. From light fluffy winter-looking clouds this morning to a thick blanket of water-drenched monsters this afternoon. Remnants, no doubt, of Rita. As this storm blows out to sea another one is upstaged in Washington. Architect of the Texas Republican revolution, Tom DeLay has been indicted for election-related crimes in Texas. He has had to step down as Majority Leader in the House of Representatives. This incredible story was pushed off the front page almost before it got there by a vote on John Roberts to become the next Supreme Court Justice and his immediate swearing in ceremony. Both stories drowned out the 62 killed by car bombs in Iraq today. And the hundreds of thousands still homeless from the past month of storms. It is almost too much to glean all at once and certainly today's one-story buzz-line media cannot do any of it justice. The cusp of an epoch has been passed and yet we keep building webs where the latch will surely tear them up again.

Tilia

2005-09-26T14:58:00.000-04:00

When I photographed this sapling, which has been growing all summer adjascent to the red oak (Quercus rubra) sapling I transplanted from Somerville, I had an instinctive sense that it might be some kind of hawthorn. I pawed through the tree guide. It is not a hawthorn. It is not an alder. The leaf looked familiar to me, but I couldn't pin it down. Is it a shrub? Is it not part of the tree species identification guide? Wait. Here it is on a well-thumbed page. This is the familiar linden tree, or American basswood, (Tilia americana). Its parent tree was earlier mistaken as a mulberry tree (by me). This common native species will produce flowers one day that will attract bees; basswood flowers, it seems, are the bees' favorite flower. Its wood was used for food boxes and wood fiber (paper). Indians used to weave a sturdy rope out its inner bark. This basswood will grow side by side with the red oak (behind it in the photograph) and one day shade the far corner of my property with drooping branches and that distinctive bee-attracting flower. Above it today, the sky hangs in the first deep cool gray of autumn. It suggests November today, even with green still mostly everywhere and temperatures in the high 60s. Muted sun, a gusting wind. You can almost hear the cackle of settling ice.

Or the cracking and breaking of patience. There are long waits for things and then there's this present set of circumstances. We confuse basswood and mulberry, something I assure you a bee would never do. We call all conifers "pine" and may be able to distinguish oak from maple, but not white from black or red from striped. There is marching death in Iraq as another week begins. Another kind of march this past weekend drew thousands to Washington, but not the millions who should have been there, out of conviction if nothing else. Today he utters the word conservation. I thought I was reading satire. And the days shorten into fall light and the linden tree reaches skyward.

Stability

2005-09-23T10:24:00.000-04:00

Is this a showy aster (Aster spectabilis)? I was confused before about this very same plant. On August 19, under the heading "Asters" I wondered whether it might be a New England aster (Aster novae angliae), and doubted myself. This is the strength of good record-keeping. Now I know the flowers, and I was mistaken, but not to the degree I believed in August. This species of aster grows in dry and sandy places, like the pile of sandy soil across my right-of-way. This characteristic makes it a soil conservationist by nature. Its roots hold together otherwise erodable soils across Massachusetts and New York, and as far south as Georgia. It grows slowly through the summer. This one appeared in June and leafed out in July. Then suddenly here at the end of September, following a brilliant wave of yellow from its goldenrod (Solidago rugosa) neighbor, these purpish flowers have bloomed. Probably the last flowering of the year before we begin our descent into the inertia of winter. Fall solstice passed yesterday.

"This is what happens," She says as she carefully paints a patina on already painted paneling. "All of the shit comes around and back again." A bus exploded in traffic on a highway outside of Dallas. At least 20 dead. "They have made killing like a game," she says bitterly, exposing her intolerance for United States policies, having suffered at the hands of them in childhood and youth and young adulthood in a South American city. "It mirrors their actions elsewhere." Buses exploding in Texas, car bombs in Bagdag, munitions in Iraq. There are hurricanes bearing down on the Gulf Coast and all eyes are watching. Nature has suddenly become a great metaphor for global cultural frustrations. In history, watersheds are turning points, moment after which everything simply cannot be the same. Stories and then pictures of emaciated Jews being liberated from death camps in the 1940s was one of those moments. The image of a frail blue ball hovering in the vast nothingness of outerspace, was another. Poverty-stricken Americans perishing in southern cities by the thousands may be yet another. Here at the cusp of summer and fall when the balance of day and night is near equal, we have to reflect on the shifts in consciousness potentially underway. Our actions and conscience may become like the showy aster, holding fragile soils in place, making the wild flourish.

Cycles

2005-09-21T09:22:00.000-04:00

This flower, the cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus) is native to Texas and the southern United States, but has begun to flourish here in the north these past few decades. They are a stunning display, growing like wiry weeds, carrot fluff, skyward for months. Two inches, four, a foot, two, four, then in August, like a slow motion fireworks display, the blooms started popping out. Lavender and pink and colors in between. The seeds were a gift from a friend and colleague, who had picked them the year before from her pollinated buds. This year we carefully gathered the seed to pass along to a new circle of friends. This flower likes hot sun for as much of the day as it can receive it. It doesn't need water, but, like any reasonable plant, it will take advantage of having water. This one got pampered through our past summer's drought. Another cluster of cosmos a few blocks away got no water at all and seems to have flowered as vigorously. The Texas landscape, it would appear, makes tenacity a virtue.

A hurricane bears down on the central Gulf of Mexico where warm waters promise to spin it into a dangerous frenzy. Killings persist in Iraq. Refugees are becoming refugees again. Permanent transportees. The overwhelming evidence is drowning out the success of their pep rally politics. Americans are willing to believe the myth and embrace its special brand of narcissism, but only to a point. Too many have died at the hands of this foolishness. Nothing was what they said it was, and everything has turned sour in the ways more reasonable men have predicted for years now. The facts are a nagging bunch of hecklers, like the cosmos in August, they have suddenly bloomed in a wave of bright colors attracting the eye.

Common

2005-09-19T09:31:00.000-04:00

This apple tree (Malus sylvestris) was only two inches high and four leaves old last year at this time. I have it on video tape. We decided to let it grow, once it started because it was so nicely centered in the planting area next to the porch. Many believe that the European crab apple is the original native species from which this huge variety of cultivated domesticated temperate tree species came. This one has shot straight up into the air this summer. During July and August, when it was about half as high as it is today, it was infested with mites of some kind, which were in turn eaten by black ants. Originally, I thought the black ants were eating the top of the tree, but someone insisted that I look closer and I saw them eating the tiny insects that were eating the top of the plant. Did it grow from the seed of the tree across the right-of-way, or in the yard next door? Or did the seed for this tree come from elswhere? This specific tree has a story I may never know; the species has a story as old as human beings, at least. This bearer of wordly knowledge in the Old Testament, as old as civilization. Varieties were brought to Massachusetts by pilgrims in 1626, growing in numbers by 1630. Is this a blue blood descendant? Or is it one of innumerable variations on the theme? Is it a native, an American crab apple? All it tells me this year is that it responds well to regular watering and desires to grow taller. I am hoping it opens next season with some branching. For now it does not seem even to have developed buds. Domesticated plants require an entirely different regimen, having been allowed to flourish at the careful hands of cultivation and husbandry. They are not used to going it alone. Their simple quality of storing for long periods of time gave them early favor with humans. The Romans loved them as we do today. What do I have before me here?

There is a lull afoot. Not that tides have turned, mind you, but the noise is down, somehow, the volume adjusted for human ears. Violence still marks every day in Iraq and an entire city of homeless people wait still for permanent re-location, home or otherwise. The President promised millions, billions to aid all the victims of this "random unexpected natural disaster" as he called it at the outset. One can grant a certain amount of uncertainty in any outcome, and so his rhetorical turn seems successful again. But uncertainty was precisely our point before the war, before the certainty they said they had to move. The problem with this Presidency is no longer episodic, it is chronic. Their episodic responses make them appear even more out of step than we thought. This lull, then, is a careful catching of our collective breaths as we digest everything that has happened since Katrina struck, since Iraq began, since that horrible morning when those fanatical men flew those planes into the sides of the World Trade Centers. The tide has not turned, but it is about to. This quiet you hear, this calm you sense, it is the gathering of something, I think. Justice and civility are as much a part of civilization as the common apple tree; we must turn to what we know and recognize our common ends.

Long-tail

2005-09-16T21:29:00.000-04:00

This mourning dove (Zenaida macroura) might or might not be the same one of a pair that fed from the finch-spill of seed underneath our backyard birdfeeder this year. I don't believe they had a hatchling, so this wouldn't be him. The nest they made in our gutter lasted only until the next rain. Sadly, that was almost six weeks of time. The same pair visited once while I painted a window. This may also be an entirely different bird - individual, not species, I'm certain it's a mourning dove. You've heard them. They live everywhere in the United States. That late afternoon melancholic cooing: Òcoo-OOH, Ooo-Ooo-OooÓ. You know the one I mean. That sound of sorrow. The birds, both male and female, produce a crop milk, a regurgitation material higher in protein and fat than both cow and human mik. They produce it for three days for their hatchlings before gradually replacing it with foraged seeds. These doves are a native to the continent and have filled parts of every ecosystem. In some places, this bird is protected by local and state laws as a valuable song bird. In other states, it is hunted for game meat. Yet it remains among the ten most abundant birds in the United States. Òcoo-OOH, Ooo-Ooo-OooÓ Is it because its wings whistle in flight from its short bursts of wingbeat? They are not afraid of people, for the most part, and seem even to recognize some individuals. They suggest a friendly and peaceful nature. They are unassuming in their beauty. This one is thirty yards away on a wire in the rain. You can make out by his shape and his body movements that he is a mourning dove. But you miss the beauty of his colors and the sound of his call. Nevermind. He will be somewhere near you again tomorrow.

All the schisms are coming bare, and his enemies are leaping for opportunities. Now it's a matter of raw power and renewed manipulation. Iraq is in Civil War and Ireland seems on the brink of escalating violence and our own ghettos are shameful to behold and at the same time Hollywood and MTV exploit the deep angst that armchair oppression can hold for us. The race is not over. The battles are still well ahead. It is not the sudden explosive bursts, the smartbombs, the shock or the awe that herald final victory. It is stamina. Steady tides, intermittant winds and rains. I wonder, in darker moments on rainy Friday nights, whether a threatened Bush isn't somehow even more frightening than an assured Bush. I long to be the plaintive mourning dove today, Òcoo-OOH, Ooo-Ooo-OooÓ.

Seamsog

2005-09-13T22:47:00.000-04:00

This wood sorrel (Oxalis acetosella) has thrived in singular bunches in one section of the yard where the fence makes a corner. It can be found both inside and outside the fence, which makes me think it preceeds the fence's existence. If you've ever bitten into one of these leaves, also sometimes called shamrock, you'll remember the sour tangy taste, the same flavor sensation as rhubard, and composed, they say, of the same chemical (a salt, binoxolate of potash). It is a tender looking plant and it has tender habits. Its sets of three heart shaped leaves are creased in the center and will only open fully in shade. In the sunlight they fold toward the stalk, shielding the leaf from direct light, and perhaps too much evaporation. It is rumored that at night and during storms, the leaves fold completely, leaving only half the surface to face winds and dew. The light green plant stands out amongst crab grass and clover and blue stem. And they give a lovely unexpected tang to summer salad.

He pretends, now, to be responsible. Oddly timed. Maybe. Now that money is being shoveled out of the Treasury into no-bid contracts for some familiar names, the logic of their timing comes clear. Now that a social disaster has been converted into cash opportunity for large construction and reconstruction firms, the true meaning of Bush-style charity becomes plain as day. As if it weren't plain enough already. And responsibility is the only thing left to take from these circumstances now. And, still, we wait. Folding our leaves completely to protect ourselves from wind and heavy dew.

Indian-bean

2005-09-11T13:37:00.000-04:00

This northern catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) tree has sprouted in amongst a thicket of wild cherries and Norway maples. Its leaves come latest in the season. There is another catalpa of the same species, perhaps even a relative, on the other corner of the property next to mine. It is growing on the west side of an enormous white oak. This one hasn't matured and hasn't flowered, but it has grown for several years now, reaching out from underneath the cherry towering to its east. Every leaf it makes it makes to face the open air of the right-of-way and potential sunlight. The maples in its vicinity have all got brown rotted splotches covering their leaves, some sort of fungus, I suppose, but the catalpa appears fungus-free. It isn't a native to the north. This large-leaved showy, flowering tree was named by the native Americans. Catalpa are a tropical tree, who once had the luxury of growing large leaves, for certainty of sunshine. Now it conserves its energy, coming in late, leaving early and waiting years to flower. It will be back next year. Of this I am certain.

As if his own incompetence were a virtue. It is refreshing, however, to see the nobility of the American people, when pressed. This was not the way Exodusters fleeing Kansas were treated in the Depression, nor is it anything like the unwelcoming that met the Great Migration of sharecroppers in Chicago during the teens. It is a genuine helping hand, it seems, real empathy. Being a cynic, I wonder two things. How long will it last? and Why does it take a disaster to bring it out in us?

Yellow

2005-09-09T08:04:00.000-04:00

This black oak (Quercus valutina) sapling is older than it looks. It grows slowly and carefully in the understory of Norway maples, white oaks, and its parent tree, a 30 foot tall black oak. It gets late day sun and its thick green leaves make the most of it, but do not make too much of it. It waits. One leaf or two, patiently riding out the seasons. It has no need to rush, it has confidence in its place. Perhaps, one day, the canopy behind it will open to the east and it will shoot skyward. Or maybe its life will be lived down here at the edge of a right-of-way. Either way, it seems, is fine with this oak. It is known as a black oak, but it is also called a yellow oak. Called the yellow because it produces a yellow substance under its bark that used to be dried and powdered and was used to die clothing yellow. We no longer have such relationships with this tree and most people no longer realize the existence of a yellow skin hidden beneath this nondescript specimen. The bulk do not even see this tree, who pass it every day, pick at it mindlessly with their fingers as they walk chattering on a cellular phone about things happening elsewhere, and jump into their cars.

Are we changed by the visible oppression in New Orleans? Does seeing classism and the despising of the poor jar something in our collective conscience about loving others as ourselves and the like? Does the deep visceral gut-wrenching horror that we feel when we learn that the police and National Gaurd treated the victims like criminals themselves, after they finally arrived on the harrowing scene, leave us reminded of our obligations and stir up that better part of our nature, dormant for so long? Can tragedy make us better people, somehow? The next weeks and months and the way we carefully assess the spin will tell. Just remember, New Orleans was not caused by patience like the understory oak, it came from petulance of the socially sanctioned kind.

Knees

2005-09-06T18:23:00.000-04:00

This lady's thumb (Polygonum persicaria) is a member of the barley family, so is rhubard. Lady's thumb was brought to North America from Europe and has become a "naturalized" weed in most of North America south of the Arctic Circle. If you live on this continent, you probably have lady's thumb in your yard, or nearby. Its name comes from the triangular splotch in the center of its lance-like leaves, which looks like a smallish thumbprint, a lady's thumbprint. Its flowers are a light pinkish purple and it is an attractive plant to look at. This one has survived multiple lawn mowings and has flourished into a sturdy upright flowering mature adult. It will go to seed and leave its offspring behind to visit me in future years. I look forward to these meetings. The Latin name for the barley family, Polygonum, means many knees. Every leaf joint on the lady's thumb is bulbous like a knee. Its many names are self-referential. Refreshingly so.

The same cannot be said of our public language today. In this discourse we speak to conceal, we talk to assuage, we chatter to flatter, but we rarely talk truth. No one will say, out loud, for the record, I don't know, or, I am uncertain, or, that hurt me. We are steeled to the real sentiments of life. We are then shocked when the consequences of our indifference float out from flooded cities of our imagination. The things we do come back to us, whether they come to haunt or to comfort depends upon the care we use in our deeds in the first place. I will look for my polygonum next spring.

Linden

2005-09-05T08:03:00.000-04:00

American basswood (Tilia americana) has one of the more distinct flowers and fruit formation of the trees in the neighborhood. This is the flower, the pale leafy thing is the petal. In a few more weeks it will drop these berries onto the right-of-way next to my house and color the street for a short time. Last year, when I didn't look carefully, I thought this was a mulberry tree. I didn't look at the flowers or pay attention to the berries, I only saw the spilling of berries all over the ground. Sometimes casual attention is horribly ineffective. Quick conclusions lead to mistakes and misimpressions. Does it matter whether or not it is a basswood or a mulberry? Could it not just have been an oak or a maple, without any difference to anyone or anything? What is one tree, after all? What is knowledge of it? Why such variety of plants and animals if most of us go through our own lives noticing none of them, or only a select few and not even seeing the others. How many corporate logos can you draw from the top of your head? How many different leaf types? Does nuanced information make a difference in the complexity of your thought? Henry thought it did.

The word being used now for New Orleans is murder. The most technologically advanced and militarily ready country in the world could not respond to tens of thousands of its own people starving and suffering and drowning. How many of those poor victims were left to vanquish because of Bush's foolish war in Iraq? How many were left simply because there were no wealthy people to serve in that southern city? The cracks were showing in the armor. This event will rift the whole establishment. There is no excuse for murder. We, even some who once supported this president, are horrified and disgusted. We notice this is not a mulberry tree, it is American basswood, also known as the Linden tree.

Broad

2005-09-02T22:01:00.000-04:00

This ground ivy (Glechoma hederacea) spreads from the fence line into the yard. It sends innocent shoots across the surface of the grass and over time they settle in, roots dig in and leaves shoot up to shade out the grass. When you pull out a set of leaves, you find a tangle. They not only flower and waft seeds with the wind, they are perennials, regrowing every spring from root stock and vines. Out from the edges, this plant creeps towards the center, engulfing everything in its path and dominating the surface soil when its roots are firmly in place. It reminds me of the tendencies of right-wing ideas during the past twenty years. The slow creeping towards the center, the engulfing of everything else. One day, a fresh green lawn of social justice and respect for humanity, the next, nattled roots and broad leaves, one single ivy, no grass. We must guard against the invasive species of ideas that threaten the foundation of our republic and the core of our human values. We have it in our hands to do things differently and disallow these corruptions of decency, but we have grown complacent. The ivy doesn't look very threatening one day to the next, it only reveals itself in the long view of seasons and years. Then one day, for example, hundreds of thousands of helpless Americans are left to starve and die in a flood we made possible, and the ivy has crept across every corner of the land and we cannot respond, because we no longer care, institutionally. Sure, from your livingroom, those faces and the stories are wretching. But we no longer have the social tools that allow us to act quickly on our horror. George Bush is merely the culmination. Katrina is just one of those events that pulls back the curtain and reveals the man at the levers, and his feet of clay. We should be ashamed, and begin today to start an invasive set of ideas all our own.

Blur

2005-09-01T22:06:00.000-04:00

A splash of green. This strange light. On some days it's a mystery which things to laugh at first: The certainty, or the conviction. Other days it is clearly a gray line, a shaken lens. These are historic events, but what events are not historic? Four days in the sun, four days without water, four days without food and swamped in an uncertain mob of grandmothers and drug dealers. What the hell can one person do this far away? Only one or two people can do what is needed and they seem set to dawdle. In Maynard, this mulberry tree (Morus alba) catches the streetlight on a September evening, its chlorophyl reflects the light into the lens of my digital camera. I upload that data to this server, which you have logged onto and downloaded to your screen. What a path we travel these modern days, instantly connected by representations of representations, each referring to something else in kind. The mulberry is a naturalized tree from China, whose flowers attracted silkworms. These are industrial trees, gone native. I can hear a buzzing insect all through the day, it emits a high frequency, high pitched rattle. Very loud in short bursts after which it rests for a time. Others like it in the distance. This time of year the bird song is less and there are louder buzzsaws. This weekend marks the official end of summer here in the United States. Labor Day weekend. An extra day. As if.

George Bush has caused a humanitarian tragedy. New Orleans residents cannot be left to die. The light reflected on this mulberry tree knows it better than you or I.

Breath

2005-08-31T22:16:00.000-04:00

This so-called weed, this lamb's-quarter, took root in a two foot high pile of crushed stone. Like the crab-grass growing behind it, this is a terribly tenacious plant. It will not be denied footing, life, even on the barest of possible landscapes. And it can sprout, offer up a colorful set of leaves, and probably even flower and seed right here. This barren landscape of stone dust. This is where it begins, pioneers on rock, converting minerals to flesh and cell, dropping organic matter. Over eons, soils and diversity. Even asphalt cannot keep it back for long. Life persists with a certainty beyond all else on this planet. Not human beings, necessarily, or even mammals, but life is the true constant here. But what is life? Is it in the arrangement of matter, or is it something transcendent? From where comes this impulse, this craving, these magical combinations of processes. Is life this growing thing? This weed? Or is life the thing that grows this thing? What presses on, exactly?

We are learning some lessons these days. 850 are trampled or drown in Iraq because of uncertainty. Thousands are dead and more than half a million are homeless in our our own home-grown refuge crisis, Hurricane Katrina's landfall at the mouth of the Mississippi. The images on the news are of African Americans and poor white people huddled in stadiums and bused hundreds of miles to other stadiums. Houses filled to their soffits with water. There is a 30% unemployment rate in New Orleans. There was. Now it is 100%. There are levels of inequality that derive from the general distribution patterns of ecosystems, systems of life. And there are levels of inequality that exceed our natural right, that perpetrate a terrible injustice. Our culture seems to specialize in the latter, which, in turn, seem only to compound the former.

In Argentina, world forgotten, they pray for peace every night in quiet studios, in small groups. In Japan, the same mantras are chanted, and in India and Iran. A silent majority, humanity-minded, waiting their turn. May all people be peaceful, may they have hope and enrichment. May the future bring us better days.

Glory

2005-08-30T21:22:00.000-04:00

The white trumpet-like flowers cleary identify this vine as of the morning glory family (Convolvulceae). But this is not the common morning glory (Ipomoea purpurea) that we all know so well. It is a different flower altogether. This is hedge bindwind (Calystegia sepium), which gets its name from its binding winding characteristics. It has climbed two large-stalked weeds here. It would do the same with ornamentals. It also likes to bind its way up these leaning twigs. It will wind and bind anything. Even the weed book, which usually speaks favorably of weeds, suggests to keep this species in check. It is native to North America, but invasive to cultivated ornamental gardens. Here its arrow-shaped leaves cluster and fill an otherwise non-green wooden fence and these leaning twigs. It behaves like an invasive species in its native landscape. Vines are like that, often. They hold out a pretty leave or an attractive flower and before you know it they have choked out your favorite bush or sapling tree. They grow fast, but not faster than my eyes. I will watch them carefully.

Everyone turns their eyes to the tragedy of Katrina in New Orleans and Mississippi. Even the wayward prince rose from his usual mid-summer torpor to return to the capitol and ask his army to do other work for him. And this is a terrible tragedy, especially the hubris of building cities against the sea below its level, and crowding poor into its path. We mustn't see this as nature's wrath, but our own creation. Perhaps the result of our own wrath. These are certainly the terrible results of our foolishness and lack of foresight. But the deepest tragedy today comes again from Iraq, where almost 700 Shi'ite pilgrims were killed in a panic during a procession. Someone shouted that a suicide bomber was about to blow himself up on a crowded bridge and people were thrown and jumped from the bridge to their death, while other were crushed to death by the retreating throng. This is American security at work. We are like the hedge bindwind, with less benvolence.

Feet

2005-08-28T22:12:00.000-04:00

From the ant plain. It's an oil rich world that makes this much plastic. Everything is plastic. The forms can be infinite. It wasn't always this way, but piece by piece they have replaced the hand-touched, hand-woven, hand-carved, hand-hammered, world of everyday objects with the pour-molded forms, now usually made in China. I have notihing against the Chinese, although bad labor practices anywhere are bad labor practices everywhere, but I do not like the flow of plastic. I do not like that it has grown and permeated everything, covers our houses, stores our food. Petroleum. Oil. Cancer alley. There is no good to come of it, no matter how carefully you look.

An anti-war sentiment is gaining momentum. Iraq is our now our generation's Vietnam. The next Democrat, like Nixon in the early 1970s, inherets a handgrenade with its pin pulled. George Bush has wrought havok. This is a shameful time for our country. And we will be years recovering.

Pilewort

2005-08-27T20:09:00.000-04:00

Celandine (Chelidonium majus) flowers all summer long, although its peak flowering comes in late spring. It drops seeds and grows a second generation during the summer. These are late celandine, with fewer flowers. They are members of the poppy family and imported to North America from England. They have an unusual yellow or saffron colored sap that was once used to treat liver disease, warts, and freckles. They seem to favor edges, but I suspect this is because we mow the middles. All of my flowering weeds grow just beyond the reach of my mower blade. Even this hearty weed seems less vibrant in the draught. Fewer late season flowers, a palish tint to the leaves. This may be the usual response to an absence of water, the trees and plants and weeds must have been wilting before when the rains didn't come. But this is the first time I have noticed. Did maples begin turning this early always? Did crabgrass expand imperialistically? Can the metaphors sustain across culture and ecology? Did tradition flower? This celandine, this season, these deep lobed leaves. On a hot but dry Saturday in the last weekend of August, rhythms and routines begin anew.

More death and more war. Everyday the driving ambitions of wealth and status, acquired for unusual purposes and glances the other way. Each individual, one point, no light.

Trilogy

2005-08-26T21:54:00.000-04:00

Trees everywhere look challenged by this summer's drought. Limp top leaves; the horse chestnut are browning at their tips. I see locust shriveling, not from the heat, but from the incessant absence of vital fluids. We are all dehydrated, filled with sugars and processed substances, caffeine and bad ideas. Will fall rains come or will the drought continue? This parched summer. And even without the rains, this queen anne's lace and poison ivy and virginia creeper hold court on roadsides. The trees may prove to have made too big an investment in favorable weather, but these vines and flowers move with much more adaptibility. They are flexible where they need to be, they pay for their individual fragility, with profligacy and variation and an uncanny ability to grow under the widest range of conditions. These pioneers of once-tended lands soak up last fall's moisture from the leaf cover and regulate themselves for optimal photsynthesis. You can see how the creeper disguises itself as a poison ivy plant. And you can see how the lace's delicate structure creates the illusion of a large flower, where there are dozens of smaller ones. This brother of the carrot has an edible root. Its seeds are nearly invisible.

All the other noise seems trite in comparison. Is there a shift afoot, or are we indeed barreling toward that netherville of absurdity. People like things easy; it's an odd impulse having been spawned from such a long and detailed past, but so it is.

Rain

2005-08-24T18:31:00.000-04:00

The rain we've needed all summer sprinkled some this afternoon, as the first of my two remaining sunflowers burst open with bright yellow petals and began its final prayer to the day. This irony delighted me. There was a definite fall in the air, a chill in the morning and a general cool throughout the day. August has one more week and yet I saw colors in the swamp behind the Lincoln Conservation fields off route 126, and yellowing poison ivy is everywhere. All summer this thick stalked oversized flower has edged itself skyward. Its moment of triumph comes as the region's native dwellers begin a retreat for the season. Everywhere, juxtapositions. I no longer hear the orioles, but the goldfinch were loud yesterday. My cherry tomatoes are just about passed, but the beef-steak tomatoes still have a week or two to go. The sun skipped and jumped between low foreboding clouds all day and found an opening once again at the end. No hint of summer, though, the angles are all wrong. Transition, four weeks until solstice, in the glacier-scraped, hilly town of Maynard.

Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez today on his 700 Club Christian Show. How charitable. More walls are going up in the West Bank. The outpost settlements, those furthest isolated from militarized Israel, have been evacuated completely. The larger ones will remain and are getting a wall. An enormous piece of defensive engineering. Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush keep saying the war is going well, despite the brewing Iraqi civil war and the commitment of more United States troops. The world has indeed gone mad.

Virginia

2005-08-23T18:12:00.000-04:00

This creeper has made its way slowly up the back fence. It sprouted out of a tangle of pokeweed and crabgrass and cedar in the darkest corner of the yard. It is in search of sunshine. We are scraping away, seeking the authentic, and there, in the corner of my yard, one finds authenticity in action. This vine, Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia), grows all over the east, from Ontario to Texas. It survives, even thrives, despite being frequently mistaken for its non-relative neighbor, poison ivy (Rhus radicans). This one won't make you itch. It has five palmate leaves. It holds itself to the fence with adhesive discs growing on the ends of tendrils, branching out from the vine's stalk. Some people call it American ivy; like poison ivy, it is a native species. It grows with the patience of a tree, gathering, building in measured bursts, gathering again. Under beige and white and green and brown, I find bare pine boards, dried with age. Out of a tangle of shrubs and weeds, this vine.

Under the guise of false premises created to scare us into poor decision-making, the President engaged us in war in Iraq. Under equally false pretences he seems perched to escalate the war. Is there an echo in here? Was everybody at the fridge the last time this happened? They turn our objections into opportunity, they are the shrewdest of men. It is time for new vocabularies and syntax. A language steady like the Virginia creeper making its way toward certain sunshine from the back corner of my cultivated lot.

Biloba

2005-08-22T15:16:00.000-04:00

This sprout of a gingko came to this place in a plastic bag. It looked like a dead twig with a curly root. We put it in the ground and gave it water. This season, these leaves sprouted and began building up energy for next year's growth. The gingko is considered sacred by Chinese in its native south east China. The tree is considered a living fossil in my native north east America. It is part of a family, for which it is the last known survivor, that eventually gave rise to conifers. It survives because it is hardy and can withstand all the burdens of modern urban living. Smoke doesn't bother it, nor does pollution. We planted this one in a pile of fill and it has sprouted all of these leaves. We like resilient things. There is an Argentinean saying, Yerba mala nunca muere. It translates, 'the bad weed never dies.' There is something overwhelmingly noble about resiliency, something hopeful. The gingko is a hopeful tree, and a reminder of the deep time in which life has had to adapt. We witness but a glimmer, a half-glance, at something unfathomable; we can ponder, we even try to see, and hope we are not blinded. And the gingko silently, nobly, sprouts a new edition. There is no family without the individual, and no individual without the family.

There is an anger on the land. A misplaced, unplaced, disrooted anger. Too many brothers and sons and sisters and daughters, too many who were really just after a college education, getting an education in 21st century bully diplomacy. Something. Maybe its the smug smile. It could be that we've forgotten other tones of voice and dispositions. Maybe private wealth really does create an inherent instability, an elegant negation. Maybe it's the chronic dehydration, and sugar overstimulation - carbohydrates are just beer before the alcohol. Whatever it is, it simmers. It's not old like the Gingko biloba, it is very new, not even blanched yet.

Sun

2005-08-21T20:37:00.000-04:00

This flower was alive yesterday when I took this photograph. It had sprung up in the most unlikely of sandy poor soils, battled off automobile fume and oil slicks, and fought for root space with crabgrass and ragweed. Then, the real estate agent who cannot seem to sell the house and lot behind mine, pulled up in his truck and snapped it at the neck before his open house this afternoon, as if it was an eyesore. This plant had grown to five feet in height in the course of three and a half months. I saw this happen from my kitchen window and said out loud, "What the hell is the matter with people?" "What daddy?" my four year old asked from the kitchen table behind me. "Sometimes people don't pay attention to what they're doing," I grumbled. "A man just killed one of our sunflowers and I don't think he even knows what he did." "Because he didn't see it?" she asked. "Because he didn't see it." I marveled at her youthful wisdom. "He's interested in money," I said. "When you have money on the brain, it's difficult to see things." Later, after my daughter had followed me outside while I showed my oak sapling to the real estate agent (so he didn't put another footprint into it), she was at the kitchen table again, and I was looking out the window. "Did the man do what you asked him?" she asked. "He knows that the tree is there now, " I answered. "Maybe he couldn't see it because he had on dark glasses," she said.

In Ecuador protestors took over the state oil refinery and shut down oil production for several hours on Friday. As of noon today, oil production for Latin America's fifth largest oil producer is at 1/10th of its ordinary output. Protestors wanted more of the oil money spent on schools and roads. Instead, they got oil profit's current commodity of choice, a well-armed military. In Argentina workers have re-started closed factories.

Golden

2005-08-20T15:56:00.000-04:00

This flower, scorn of everyone with hay fever, flowers late in the season. There is a small patch across the right of way from where this one originated. A new cycle of flowering is upon the landscape. Golden rods, other succulent purple-berried plants, asters, other plants that have waited a better part of the season, even the sunflowers at three of the four corners of the house lot are just about to flower. The summer runs with rhythms more like moons than the steady machine or the weekly cycles; there is much to do all summer long, mind you, but not everything at once. There will be a mad rush in another month and a half to gather everything left to harvest before the seasons take it back again. We will all be rushing then, piecing together the daily routine and tasks, trudging along. And then it will be Halloween and then Thanksgiving, Christmas, and another New Year.

It is exhausting to think about. We will slow down today and watch the weeds flower and grow. Stay away from the news for a while and see how things change. Slow Saturday.

Asters

2005-08-19T09:55:00.000-04:00

There are asters growing here in this little patch of wild across the right-of-way from my front door. But I don't believe these are them. I remember thinking they would be asters last year, because their leaves are somewhat purple. I cannot remember what flowers they ultimately grew. The aster family (Asteraceae) is one of the two largest families of plants, its members include the common sunflower (Helianthus annus), many of the loose-leaf lettuces (Lactuca sativa) found in the supermarket produce departments, and artichokes (Cynara Scolymus). I was after New England aster (Aster novae-angliae). I know it grows here in this cluster of green. But it was a challenging summer over here. I removed the leaf litter from the ground, and then it did not rain for weeks. A downpour for hours last week was a good start, but most seeds will wait for a more favorable next season; believing it will come. And it may. This plant will flower in a week or so and I will have an easier time with its identity. In the mean while, I will quietly watch the late summer set in.

Asters are among the newest member of the plant species. The ginkgo trees (Ginkgo biloba) we have planted on the other side of the house are among the oldest. The war is a daily reality for so many neighbors and friends and brothers and daughters and aunts and nephews and cousins and parents. We are all new, in a way. Modern humans, newer than asters. An ecology only a century old. War is embedded in our psyche. Brute force, as Mumford called it. Gunfighter nation, according to Slotkin. Not a pretty combination. The unfolding of actions taken, as some would see it, in my name is horrifying these days. That we would move with such impetuousness across every square mile when every record is written in slow motion is a shameful character trait. We need the variety and plasticity of the Aster family. We need a new paradigm.

Mariposa

2005-08-18T20:14:00.000-04:00

This monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) fluttered amongst the milkweed plants (Asclelias syriaca) when we just stood there and watched, but she decided to hide in the middle of this Russian-olive tree (Elaeagnus augutifolia) - which isn't an olive at all - when I decided to photograph her. She came back after I put the camera away. The sole food source for monarch butterflies are milkweed foliage. The milkweed's sap renders monarch larvae and adults poisonous to birds, which is why this one flutters about freely in a songbird environment. I don't know why she was so camera shy, however. In a few more weeks, she'll be on her way to Mexico, to meet up with a couple of her relatives and friends. These green leaves will begin to turn yellow and fall from the tree and the winds will pick up. It may become too cold to spend very much time at the beach, as we did these past days. Here in the gathering months of late summer, the monarch still feeds and the leaves still hold their green. Everything is about energy now, gathering it in roots and in stomachs and in fat and in wood.

On the Gaza Strip the Israeli military flushed out dissenting settlers from synagogues this morning, which, for all of my support of the Palestinian cause, seemed unnecessarily over the top. It is difficult not to sympathize with any minority subject to the overwhelming force of a modern military. In Iraq, more deaths too. It is a hard future we have been handed and it seems foolish to forget that we cannot control it, merely leave a record of actions. How much of your money is spent on the global war-machine? What if we spent as much on education? True, real, effective education? What if we could migrate within our own ecosystems with the same grace as the monarch butterfly?

Moraines

2005-08-16T16:49:00.000-04:00

I can hear the buoyant salt water pounding against the resilient sands 200 yards to my south. A steady, rhythmic kush and roar. The Pleistocene droppings, stuck a touch too far out to sea for so many houses, are home to pitch pine and an overload of Russian olive trees, with dune grass sticking up from the sand showing in all of the open places in between. The paved road must need to be regraded often, there is nothing below us but sand for meters. I hear mockingbird and red wing blackbird and see small birds with black crowns on their heads. Seagulls loft through the air far above and plovers play tag with the lapping tides. This is valuable sand, sought-after. The oceanfront itself is gated and reserved only for community members. I am a member, temporarily, and I found my way to the edge of the continent this morning. Gulf Stream waters, more tolerable to the flesh than Gulf of Maine currents carry a heavy load of swells slowly up the steep incline of sands, rolling giants, compared to Cape Cod Bay beaches - the waves and the sand. We can excavate and wait, within minutes the sand has been leveled by roiling rising water. Small white crabs live just below the surface in the highest parts of the beach below the high tide line. The crabs are a thriving creature adapted to salty sand and able to avoid death by pounding by digging themselves deeper through the sand. And people, with dogs and children, boogey boards and books, slowly creep out onto the beach, during the hottest part of the day, this seemingly harmless overcast day now burning into a sunlit afternoon. We talk about relationships and celebrate the newly expected member of our extended family of fellow travelers. Out here on this spit of sand left by icy waters some ten millennia ago.

The uglier cohorts of our current Presidential malady showed themselves last night, driving a truck dragging chains across the mock gravesites, white crosses, put up to symbolize the dead already counted in Iraq. Chains hanging off the back of pick up trucks evoke horrible memories; these thugs, the product, no doubt, of W's education system in Texas, want protestors to remember another era when violent torture was a weekend's fun in the racist, bigoted south. Not too long ago, a black man was killed again in this way - for the crime of lust. These thugs were not merely destroying the visible signs of the folly in Iraq, and desecrating the memories of our already dead soldiers, they intended to drive fear into the heart of the protestors, rallying around a mother, whose son paid with his life for W's war. A mother who simply wants an apology. They wanted her to be frightened, to believe they might haul her off as well, to force her to succumb to their cowardice. This is the subtext of W's United States, intolerance, violence, and impetuous anger. This is the response of a culture built on shifting sands too far out to sea to be safe. We live atop the terminal moraine of the Middle Ages, now manifest as a global cult.

Histories

2005-08-12T09:11:00.000-04:00

The story of landscape and experience is written in the very structure of our language. Our language reflects the meaningful world we've inherited; we absorb and send back this meaning (it is in us too). The white spruce (Picea glauca) pictured here is also known as the Canadian spruce or skunk spruce. It is called the former, because it's native habitat is not here in Maynard, but in the peaceful nation to our north; this name tells us where it comes from. It is called the latter because, when snapped, its needles emit a skunk (Mepitidae)-like odor. It was named by a people familiar with that stinky cousin to the Asian badger. Its name tells us that skunk and skunk spruce lived in the same habitats with curious and naming people. It surely has other revealing names in the tongues of the indigenous. The formal name, white spruce, comes from the white stripes found on the needles; the tree's actual color is a bluish green fading into dark green towards its trunk. Its new growth points gently upward. This spruce grows at the back end of my backyard. My neighbor calls it a pine tree (Pinus strobus) but, while it is part of the Pine family (Pinacaea - resinous, whorled, straight-trunked, needle-bearing trees of the temperate north and high mountain south), it is not a pine tree. She doesn't want to learn its real identity because she wants to cut it down. "It's having a mast year," I told her. "Conifers don't reproduce every year, but when they do, they produce an enormous number of cones." "Great," she muttered. "More for me to clean up." I think its cones are not growing well with the drought. They seem smaller to me than they should be at this point in the season. A longer, hotter, dryer summer goes against the native tendencies of this species; this individual is adapted to flourish elsewhere. But even without cones this year, the tree itself is quite healthy and robust. Pushing ever skyward, it added a full ten inches to its height this season already, and next season's buds are forming steadily.

Out on the parched grassland of Crawford, a mother waits for her audience with the prince. I'm sure the right is cackling with contempt at her actions, walking lock-step with the party of spin, but she made the greatest sacrifice...and for nothing. Her complaint is not that her son died in warfare in Iraq, but that her President lied. She says that W told her last year - he promised her to her face as she looked him in the eye at a meeting in the White House - that he would not use the war and the visits with grieving parents for political purposes. Then, of course, he did. She wants to ask him why he lied to her, hold him to his own self-proclaimed standards. But he won't see her. Instead, he stands awkwardly in front of the gazing media, looking, I'll have to say, a little worried, a tad defensive, and says, this mother wants him to pull all the troops out of Iraq and that he cannot do that. In front of the world media, 24-hour cameras, enough information to last us into the next millenium, and he lies about this mother and her reason for camping out in a ditch at the farthest end of the security boundaries put up by Secret Service. At last, he can no longer smooth over his mean-spirited drive for power. Just watch, the rest of his corrupted party will jump ship from his agenda faster than you can say mid-term elections, and the other so-called party, sensing blood, will move in for the kill. They look worried in Crawford. It began as a mast term for this president, but political drought and hot weather seem to have stunted his cones as well.

Abundance

2005-08-11T08:28:00.000-04:00

Choke cherry (Prunus virginiana) fruit ripens and is consumed just as quickly by the multitude of bird species living in and around the neighborhood. These tart little berries contain their next generation ensconced in the fleshy nutriment; each berry, another potential tree, and each winged eater, a cultivator as well. We, too, can eat these astringent and puckery berries, but must beware of the seed, whose hydrocyanic acid is poisonous to our systems. The very tree pictured here has recovered from an infestation of the tent catepillar in late spring. Every leaf consumed and only flower clusters hanging, waiting to be pollinated. The energy stored in this individual's roots propelled a new generation of leaves in early summer and the catepillars have moved on, now metamorphosed into the flickering moths around my evening porchlight, leaving these leaves in peace. The moths are also eaten by the winged visitors to this little enclave in Maynard. I've watched the process through months, from tree bud to infestation to bloom to fruit and I know why the thick song of birds can be heard every morning at daybreak; there is joy in abundance, celebration to be had from full bellies. This is not an Earth of brutal competition, it is one of slow and measured collectivity and change, exchange of energies and provisions for life. More than enough for everyone, each creature a negotiated place, chains of relationships, but no obvious beginning or end, no strict hierarchy.

Sustenance for life is the rule of nature. Something else, it seems, rules our natures today. A psychology of domination. It expresses itself most fully in our major institutions, where brute force and unabashed exercise of raw power dig us into artifice unprecedented in the history of human habitation. We think we create comfort and habitat for oursleves, but these are merely fleeting expressions, without long term prospects. We are all miners now, excavating with frenzy, imposing measures and restrictions, undermining abundance, forcing human suffering so that a small elite may further the illusion - at least for themselves. The tart berries of modernization also contain poisonous seeds that may kill us, and have certainly changed the stakes for life everywhere. We do not follow the rules, which are simply laid out and easy for us to see, but instead trudge foolishly into degraded futures, unable or unwilling to head the signs.

Boundaries

2005-08-10T08:11:00.000-04:00

The edges of things are often the places where we find the most ambiguity and least certain boundaries. And, yet, we are obsessed with identifying and demarcating edges in this culture. But where does the ocean end and the shoreline begin? Return in an hour and look again. What marks the boundaries of tree and soil and air? Each thing blends into the next at the same time it stands with its own identity. Life, it seems, consists of negotiating the vital connections, participation in the vitality of webs, and the maintenance of independent identities. Those are spruce and fir trees, poplar and pine. I am one being. But all of our one-nesses come from connection - what we eat and breathe and transpire and think and hear and say, who we love and care for, the product of our labors, the results of our energies. Everything matters in composing the individual and no individual exists without the web. Our culture does not appreciate this truth. We embrace the mania of the one, promote the mythology of singular accomplishments as if a person could live without food and air and love. We do not trouble ourselves with the true impossibility of separateness, we draw arbitrary lines in the sand and congratulate ourselves for a job well done. We ignore the nuance and ambiguity of edges and in doing so, lose something of ourselves. Our ignorance of the webs devalues our individuality.

The hot sun burned off a fog this morning only to lift the humidy into the thick air settling against my skin. Tomato plants are bursting forth with delightful sweetness, followed by zucchini and melon, carrots and lettuce. Our little cultivated section of ground will provide a number of meals in the weeks ahead. We are grateful to it and it is grateful to us. We cannot always easily sidestep the major trends of our misguided society, but we can take the moments of true connection and revel in them nonetheless. I will feast upon joy at lunchtime, I will dine upon vitality.

August Vacation

2005-08-09T08:20:00.000-04:00

Days are wending down now as I return to my native state from a journey to the north. Here the deciduous trees are dominant. There, it is conifers, trees more adapted, so says Berndt Heinrich, to snow and ice and cold. Fir and spruce, pine and tamarack. These giants of the northern forest give the horizon a different feel, add smells to the ambient air not found in Maynard, and acidify the forest soils, changing the character of the understory. In Washington County, timber holding companies are liquidating acres, finding new uses for smaller trees as the green building supply industry ramps up its influence. There are some who look at these changes and see the dollars made and say, all is well. Others get lost on familiar roads as the landscape changes its appearance from forest to scrub. Selective harvest, a euphemism for leaving behind a mess of tangle and brush, is akin to a haircut where they just pulled out some of your hair and left the rest in its longer state. No more pretty than a bad dream or a hangover. Up in that most distant county, the east's West, where roads appear on maps few and far between and ownership maps show tiny land holdings surrounded by the baron timber company lands, there are a thousand miles of unmarked roads, engineering feats of equal might as these interstate highways that carried me right to the western edge of the county. Piles of stone and fill twenty feet deep through the middle of formidable swamp and wetland, piled with sand and crushed stone, and left as heaps across the landscape. They are known by timber cruisers and locals, mapped by the companies only and the lived memory of residents. They can get you somewhere faster than some of the public projects, but you must know the way. They also give continued access and allow the ongoing harvest of these mighty sentries of decades, now, not centuries.

No attention to the radio or newspaper or television for seven days was liberating. I learned rhythms of daily life not poisoned by the misdeeds of others or spoiled by the folly of the powerful. I reverted to a patience, the tide comes in, the tide flows out. I listened to wood thrush sing in the day, and falcon hunt their way up the shore line, and councils of crows recounting their busy days, and chipmunk chatter and squirrel visits and badger waddles. The week of a coming new moon whose crystal clear evenings brought shooting stars and the soft hazy curve of the Milkyway. Crackles of campfire and the sounds of forest in my ears as I fell into the deepest sleep gave me a nice sense of being as I return to the pace of everyday modern life and begin my complaining anew. There is so much to learn, so much we have forgotten.

Mourning Doves

2005-07-31T07:25:00.000-04:00

Yesterday as I stood perched upon a ladder applying a new layer of paint to the windows I have been scraping for the past month, a mating pair of mourning doves alighted on the electric wire a few feet above my head. They landed in that noisy way they have of squeaking with each wing beat, as if the palpitations of their wings caused their lung to force out air. I looked up and they just stood there watching me, bobbing their heads as if nodding in agreement and complimenting the work I had done. After a few minutes, they said goodbye and flew into my yard to forage from underneath the small birdfeeder I have installed there. As I walked through the back yard a few minutes later they looked up briefly from their meal, but did not run in fright. They knew me; they knew I was not a threat. The goldfinch on the feeder itself wasn't quite as sure and rushed off bobbing through the air in a bouncing trail of whistles and complaints. Solo male goldfinches are more cautious and more jumpy than mating pairs of the same bird; an extra set of eyes brings a greater sense of security. When I was painting the back window, I heard a familiar screech and looked up to catch a red tailed hawk in a broad glide above the millpond. He or she disappeared in an instant, perhaps having found the desired prey or having moved on to more promising ground. This is the second time I have seen this hawk overhead this week. There is a family of crows living across the street as well. A fledgling just learning to fly, coached out of the nest by his parents, glided overhead a couple of days ago. All of these lives in this small plot of ground surrounded by a few trees and perhaps a single thicket. Everywhere we look, life persisting. How many birds and other fellow creatures live in the unnoticed spaces around you?

What is this talk of reverence for "life" by those who merely revere human fetuses and others who claim to be of their kind? That's not respect for life, that's suicide, religious xenophobia, and misanthropy, never mind the complete dismissal of 99.9% of all life that actually is. Life, as changing and varied as it is, is always expressed as balance and hope in the natural world. Their philosophies are premised on hatred and fear. The mourning doves visited and greeted me with kindness. Where have those who claim the Gospel of love as their guide been hiding? I don't feel them genuine.

Cut Light

2005-07-30T09:46:00.000-04:00

A chilly morning and reasonable temperatures again. The sun is trying to break free from high clouds bisecting the sky into white and blue, but they lurk in the southern half, blocking its way. Out my back window I could be farther north for the spruce trees reaching into the sky and filling my view. A white and a Norway, content in their 40-50 year growing places, harkening back to mid-century, after the world war, when coffers were flush and Americans retreated to their protected hovels and houses and built fences and planted trees and stopped asking hard questions of their government. That history has been witnessed by these silent sentries, a world transformed, a culture, fully materialized, consumption, replacing political freedoms and civic pride with acquisition of more stuff, empty promises of meaning through wealth. There is a murmur underneath the great roar of commerce, questions shooting in from every side. Is this the true path of life? Are these the values that we intend to live for, perhaps die for, fight for and protect? Who has won in this dawning century? Has the poison of greed and self-interest completely consumed the better nature of human kindness and generosity? I am not innocent myself, feeling less than generous toward those I perceive as misguided, toward the great mass of corrupted men and women, even, at times toward neighbors and friends. It is difficult to stand like sentries, to merely witness the changes and not feel moved to push back. When do we break? When do we flourish anew?

I notice three species of oak growing within ten feet of where I sit in this urbanized settled little town of Maynard. Here, where earth has been filled and packed, where a century of lead paint has drained into the ground, trucks have driven, buildings have have been built and removed, not once, but twice. Where smoke and soot and pesticides and hebicides have been dumped, three species of oak stand tall, taking their place in my landscape. Reminding us all. Challenging us to remember.

Delicious Day

2005-07-29T11:01:00.000-04:00

High wispy clouds and dry cool air as if we have been transported to early fall in western Montana. An extra layer of cotton is necessary to feel comfortable in the morning. Exposed flesh gathers goose bumps with the gentle breeze. It makes the blood pump harder and everything pick up steam inside. It colors the land in the most delightful blue coloration. One stands directly in the sun, the balance between its warming rays and the cooling vacuum of space in perfect harmony with a balance sought by spirit and flesh. Today we are prepared to face head on those monsters who ravage tradition and ethical conduct. They cannot fog our minds with their double speak, and their lies have lost their lift. We may push back, ever so slightly, turning their momentum, piece by piece, and slowly there by freshening the air and cooling the humid breeze of corporate oppression and the heat-soaked goals of efficiency. The green canopy works double time today, pulling and storing and preparing. The plants sense the shorter daylight better than we with our artificial climate and our artificial sunlight. They know the season and make their subtle adjustments in due course. We are always lagging, but today we have a shot at redemption. Today we can see clear-eyed through the atmosphere, to the farthest horizon and beyond. The waters reflect and they ripple, the branches and stalks tip and sway, chattering amongst themselves about seasons to come. Birds make plans, even while they continue to celebrate the day. We are almost upon our transitional time again and the sense of hopeful exuberance is palpable in the sounds of morning, in the rising afternoon.

Let them call it a struggle and a not a war, let them make false claims about their successes, let them lay the whole set of traps that will be exposed and unavoidable when the tide pulls back out to sea. The breath of redemption is a cool mid-summer breeze after weeks of too much heat and humidity.

Cooling Winds

2005-07-28T08:57:00.000-04:00

A cold front moved south from Canada last night, bringing some rain, though not enough, and cooler weather. One can move more and think more clearly with a bit of chill in the air. But the draught of this summer is starting to tax the plant life in neighborhood. The choke cherry trees across Front Street have begun to drop their redundant leaves, yellowing and falling to the ground. Even weeds are wilting and loosing their lowest foliage. These plants will not die, they merely adjust to extant conditions. This can go on for some time; even with broad swings in temperature and rain, the life here will evolve and adjust. But one must sense change and be perceptive of alterations in order to allow living systems to make the shifts they must at times. In a human world that runs from such sensitivity, we have locked ourselves in place, sheltered ourselves from the knowledge that is there to be learned. It is a point I keep returning to, because I believe it is important to our long-term well-being. We have ceased to adapt ourselves and set ourselves on a course of forced stasis. We build and develop and grow and plan as if nothing is to change. There may be flexibility in the way today's modern managers approach the internal society of their corporate culture, but there is none with respect to the world outside. We hear of declining biodiversity and changing climate and toxins in every American and we do not change. We know the consequences of our actions, and we lie to ourselves about them. We make ourselves increasingly, perilously unprepared for the world we have made, and not for ignorance or an inability to predict, but because, at bottom, we would rather live a few moments in false control, than give in to the realities we are embedded in. It is a truism on the social and the personal level, her in the (dis)United States. We no longer look to the world around us for information and knowledge, we turn to the glowing screen, and it has an interest in other goals than our long-term survival. We are such delicate natures, and yet treat ourselves and our fellows as if delicacy were a thing of the past, as if we could erase 5 million years of evolution through the brute strength of steel production and highway building, as if our natures were not cultivated on this rolling, spinning, globe. Who has the energy to swim against the tide of conformity? Who has the courage to change?

Entertainment

2005-07-27T09:26:00.000-04:00

In a nation where most people believe their first order of business is to be entertained, to have a good time, and to take life unseriously, truth seems dour. It's odd in a way, because truth can be empowering and uplifting and full of hope -- you are part, you are life, you have potentials you haven't even begun to tap -- and yet so many see nothing but work for themselves or suffering. We mustn't pay too many taxes, we need that money for our gas costs; we mustn't criticize the things we have questions about, no one wants to field awkward conversation or look straight at what is to be seen. Blindered we advance and blindered we erode the very thing that keeps us up. If through my personal life time I can maintain the belief in whatever I choose to believe and it makes my own brain satisfied and my own emotions soothed, what more can be asked of me? Tell that to the cattle and the hogs and the chickens and the insects and weeds of the midwest and the rivers of the far West, and the children condemned to the isolated ghetto and the marginalized around the world. Tell them your philosophy and see what sort of understanding they can find for you. Tell them that you need your SUV and global climate change inducing energy supplies and biodiversity destroying agriculture. Tell them that it would be too much for your pampered disposition to have to suffer in any way. Explain to them why you are to be more privileged and provided with more material, even if it came from their back yard. Explain why you must be overweight while their children starve and suffer, their people die brutal deaths with your tax monies (that you are willing to pay). Explain why injustice is not an idea you extend to their lives. Why you must come first in every instance and never have to give a thought to the other lives around you, watch them understand your plight and feel a pity for the risk that you may have to give up some small part of your over-consumptive life-style if they keep asking for justice. Justice will hurt your privilege; explain to them, you will have none of their foolishness.

Inequity in nature besets entire communities who pull their pieces together and hold tight to a kind of imbalanced equilibrium. Not stasis, mind you, but changing stability. Life persists. Modern isolation has left us ignorant of these deep rhythms, severed our present from the deep past of human habitation and knowledge of place. In our air-conditioned movie theatres we bombard our senses with the sights and sounds -- but none of the consequences -- of violence and aggression and narrow escapes. Carrying those ideals into our air-conditioned automobiles and our air-conditioned houses and why are we so intolerant and inhumane and miserable with our station? Why do we turn from the truth as if some unwelcome neighbor at our exclusive party? What are you really afraid of?

Obscured

2005-07-25T10:35:00.000-04:00

Wind all morning, low pressure pulling air with forced gusts out of my house, pressing shades against the windows as the whole atmosphere creates a vacuum. Sun obscured by high gray clouds, threatening, mildy, rain, perhaps. But maybe not. The sun cracked through for a short glimmer and disappeared again. The air is as dry as yesterday and Saturday, but this morning it has stayed cool, radiation absent in sufficient levels to bring it up. It flattens the colors, yellows the greens and brightens the rest. Not washout, but paler than the stark blues of the sunlit day. Fall again seems immanent, although the tomato has only just begun to fruit and the squash has only just begun to flower. I was told they would catch up in good weather, but I think they have fallen behind, or the weather is confusing me. Some days there apear clear baselines and regular patterns; other days, who can say what is to be seen? This mass hypnosis, mass psychosis, culturally sanctioned individualism that disconnects the individual from that which lifts and supports and affirms and creates. I am not my body, I am not this Earth, I do not need awareness or sense of place because I am the only one, singular, battling against the rest of life, so unknown to me, so unusually interested in such other things besides me. I will dress better and drive faster and speak louder and take more, lest some one senses the fear that drives me. I will obscure my own existence by building artificial walls of sound and structure never imagined by the life, and only constructed to hide the secret that each of us hides. I am not my shit or my piss, I do not consist of bones and flesh and systems beyond my ken. I am only me, singular, alone, fighting the good fight for life. I am spirit, then, and only one, this one, aware here of my needs and my wants and my fears, disconnected. These are the lessons we learn.

And sadly untroubled, disgest with our morning news. Five to the head from the once unarmed bobbies. No apologies. Innocents must die that the guilty feel fear. These are the manifestations that follow.

How long to re-learn what is actually true?

Perfect Saturday

2005-07-23T10:29:00.000-04:00

A breeze, cool air, and bright sunshine, not a drop of humidity in the air. The heavy haze of yesterday blown out to sea, replaced by air and light and temperatures that are in perfect balance with body temperature and skin sensation. One could live a thousand days like today and never complain. The green of the trees and grass and flowers has a lovely blue hue to it, reflecting the sky above. Cool dry days carry more blue, hot humid days like yesterday are more yellow and orange. There is still no rain, nor any forecast, but the existing dampness in the Earth and in the leaves does not seem threatened as yesterday. Plants do not look burdened or leaning toward cell collapse and wilting. Instead, everything appears crisp, full of life, purged of the bad odors and heavy pall of mechanized human society with just the steady gust of Canadian wind.

But appearances are only one level of reality, a fact exploited by the authoritarian regime housed in Washington today. Beneath the apparent purity, we know too many toxins flow. Children and babies are carrying a broad range of chemicals and heavy metals in their tissue, residue from the ongoing misguided battle to subdue everything truly natural. Where ancient wisdom told a people they were out of balance with natural cycles and they learned and adjusted, this so-called modern civilization hears only potential defeat and so fights harder at its conquest. Are random plants filling places in a perfect lawn? Spray them with death-o-cide. Do insects feast on your mono-crops? Kill them, kill them, kill them. So much knowledge and wisdom of the Earth lost in this all-consuming culture of hate and greed and sanctioned lunacy. It is no wonder we send our young men and women out to do more killing; it is all we know anymore. No ears to hear, no eyes to see, no mind to change, simple plodding foolishness. Nothing more.

And still the breeze blows and the cool air comforts and I continue to write because I continue to hope. May truth re-surface through these murky waters of modern times and save us from our present fate.

Summer Haze

2005-07-22T11:19:00.000-04:00

Nothing but heat today. Sun rising in the brilliant blue sky and just a moment of cool air before its radiation cut through and raised temperatures into the 90s. Even without heavy humidity, the air hangs like a wool blanket, forcing every pore to loosen its internal faucets. Plants kept captured in clay pots suck up every ounce of water before noon, before the heat can evaporate what's left, by 1:00 they've wilted, loosing internal cell structure to transpiration. Brown patches appear on the lawn, and one looks for shade at every step. The sun gives energy to life, but the sun challenges our limits as well, fogs our brains, overheated and exhausted inside warm skulls. It drills into our vision, closing pupils and creating indoor blindness after a few minutes in the outside. But this is the existence of being here on Earth and I would not trade it for artificially cooled rooms, artificially dry, like those who live within them, sequestered from reality and so living unreal. It is no wonder here in the (dis)United States of North America we can barely find the time to know our neighbors or understand our colleagues or love our children. As everyone pursues the dream of conquest in their own personal fiefdom, they lose something vital. And this is just the citizens, the leadership, now even further removed, knows nothing of life, nothing of Earth, nothing of being true. The whole system rests upon a lie, and no one has the courage to point it out. For those who do are marginalized, ostracized, and otherwise rebuked. Who wants a culture of fear but those who stand to gain from it. And so, each excuse and every act of cultural loyalty marks you as a traitor to your deepest known truths. You may sit there and deny this, but you can not escape its grasp.

The Harkening

2005-07-21T11:30:00.000-04:00

In January, there were the first signs of spring. This morning, the cool air and muted sun suggested fall to me. Each season anticipates the next in kind. There is plenty of summer left, mind you, but here in late July I feel the first suggestion of autumn. Indeed, the days have already begun a quiet shortening, and some of the earliest leaves of spring have yellowed and fallen off some of the trees in my neighborhood. What are we to make of these changes embedded in an otherwise consistent time? Is it not the overarching pattern of life itself? Like the plants that seem dormant while building energy and suddenly exploding from one day to the next, or the quiet seed that starts it all? These are universal patterns and as an active member of this universe, I cannot help but think the culture of human beings might be exactly the same. These deadly times, this misguided leadership (though I hate to use that word to describe them), the fanaticism that drives power and power's enemy, the myopia and fear, these are the dominant trends. They have been growing in influence since my first political awareness in the 1970s. They have been growing in influence, in fact, since the 1960s. Their seed was planted and it eventually flourished. A reactionary, mysanthropic, frightened, paranoid, life-denying set of ideas that have gained prominence. Their simple-minded statements of certainty appeal to the under-educated and the greedy alike. And so they have put down roots and grown their tree of evil. But all things pass into the next, like seasons and life itself. And I believe the seeds of a new world and a new culture are being planted today. We are in the final flourishing, perhaps the mid-summer, of fanaticism and fantasy politics. I will criticize and complain, but in my soul I must believe that change will come and I will help it rise. I hope you too will take the time to notice and care and perhaps be a part of cultivating the good life to come.

Let us work for an end to this unnecessary and brutal ideology.

Rhythms

2005-07-20T06:49:00.000-04:00

The morning sun cut an orange sliver of light on the west wall of my bedroom this morning. A mid-summer greeting as it reached precisely the point on the horizon when its rays could make their way from the east window on the far side of the bathroom, through the hall and onto that wall. It did not shine there yesterday, it may not shine there tomorrow. Just this morning, this moment, this day. There are constants and there are variations, there is stability and regularity and there is flux and constant change. They say that a colored sun in the morning portends a storm, but in this case I think it is just the humidity, thick enough on the horizon to bend the white light into its second of seven visible colors. It will be hot today, oppressively. This means that I will move slowly, but it means that energy consumption and thus a contribution to the overall warming and heating of this great ball in space will rise as the pampered and disconnected feed themselves artificial cool. The birds, the rodents, insects and animals all bear the conditions in their various ways with their various strategies and continue to subsist. We would do well to learn a little from that.

But learn we do not. Is it possible that an entire culture can suffer from rampant narcissism? Possible? Actual. Even those who know better, and you know who you are, are too cowed with fear or denial of the real true consequences to opt for a better world. Your noses are brown and souls are shamed as you quietly comply, safely ensconced in your air-conditioned office, doing nothing of value, and collecting your check. Is it any wonder that violence and depression and obesity and misery are rampant in the United States? We are a culture lost, completely convinced of our own legitimacy. What is that nagging doubt you hear whispered in your mind during those rare quiet moments of honest reflection? You know.

Climate

2005-07-19T11:08:00.000-04:00

The humidity has been heavy these past two days, layering a haze of suspended water particles just above the earth. They jump out and stick to anything cool, perhaps they even nourish these green plants who haven't seen root water in almost a month. The season of summer is upon us. The plants in full regalia, green of every hue, and us stripped down to our bare minimum, exposed flesh, perspiring skin. For plants this is the busy season, for mammals, we slow down. Everything with its cycle and season. These rhythms move slowly, almost imperceptibly, but persistent nonetheless. It was but a hundred days prior, a hundred rotations of the earth and a third of a rotation around the sun, when this very same patch of ground was locked in ice and cold. When weeds and flowers lay dormant beneath the snow as energy-bearing root mass or the potential of seed. When trees were barren and gray, holding fast to their stored sugars well below the frost line. That time is all but forgotten in the lush green of summer. And it is as if it will never be upon us again, though we know that it will. I have noticed that plants themselves consist of varying cycles, even in their flourishing months. There is a period of slow growth or no growth when, I am guessing, the plant gathers up stored energy and pulls what it can from the sun, and there are periods of rapid, almost frenzied growth, when this energy is quickly converted into leaf and stem and stalk, a gathering and an expression. To be always on the go, Nature seems to show, is unnatural.

I wonder how we have removed ourselves so completely from these facts of life, these truths of healthy existence. I have no doubt we have. I know the myth of the need to conquer nature, I hear the parable of modernity that says before we had all these trappings, the technology, the climate control, the transportation and communication infrastructure, we suffered and starved and led lives of misery. I think history, however, has been foreshortened in these tales. 500 years, or a 1000 have come to stand in for tens of thousands of years of sustained human habitation. That they have made their domination less miserable does not negate the domination. We are too short-sighted in modernity, and, in truth, we still suffer and starve and lead lives of misery. It is these lies we have been drilled to believe that harm us most.

Lurking

2005-07-18T06:34:00.000-04:00

It has threatened rain now for days, high clouds yesterday and today. Heavy laden with rain, but semingly unwilling to release their burden. This has been a long, hot dry summer since the solstice, without the artifical supplements provided by my own paid for water supply most of my flowers and trees and vegetables would be suffering for water now. They are not as adapted as the wild flowers that continue to creep skyward across Front Street. The things we desire, the aesthetics we aspire to, these are always more work than taking what has come to us and finding beauty there. Against the judging eyes of my neighbors, however, I have not cut my lawn every time it seems long, but let the grass hold its moisture. Do we know how to manage our mini ecosystems even? I see chemicals and exotics everywhere I look up and down my block. I let wild flowers flourish and neighbors ask why I'm growing weeds. How we come to the life around us, I think, tells us how we come to our own fact of life. We struggle for control and achieve something less.

As in my yard, so it is in the nation. Fools embrace foolish ideas, uncritical claims of superiority and unquestioned acts of brutality and injustice and still she shops for a brand new SUV and pushes her gas-guzzling Navigator out into traffic with air conditioning blasting her senses and the DVD player keeping the young ones quiet in back. How can we come to know each other or what we live for under such conditions? It may not have been a conscious plan, but conservative America has dumbed us down and prepared us to be good consumers in their economy. George Bush is evil, but all the citizens of this once great nation who have been snowed into believing otherwise are the real culprits. Ignorance is no excuse, even if the markets try to tell you it is. Shame. Shame on you. You know who I mean.

Recovery

2005-07-17T08:18:00.000-04:00

It's four a.m. when the birds note the changing light, ever so slight, that indicates a new day. From their perches around the neighborhood they begin an insistent song. Is it celebration, or do they believe their own voices are needed to arouse the sun? This ceremony has such regularity and gives the heart a boost. Better than we, the birds appreciate this life, this earth, these rhythms. They are not immune to reconstructing nature to their needs, building nests and pulling life from the Earth to feed their young, but they do so with a kind of deep honor not seen among humans today. Reverence and humility, joy and appreciation. For us, the mornings are blasted out of alarm clocks and cold showers and a deep desire for another vacation. I see the workers in their dress shirts and ties heading to another day at the computer terminal, sweating off the last remains of last night's alcohol, the necessary elixir for drowning out that psychic pain, that sense of unfulfillment, the dying hope that someday, somehow, somewhere, life will be about something more than this incessant grind. I know there is more. I watch the white spruce behind my house slowly build its seeds in this mast year, more than it will need, the squirrels will eat well this winter. I see the mulberry tree at the bend in Front Street dropping its profligate load as well, feeding insects and birds, and even the molds and fungus. All life truly lived contributes more than it takes. Our modern desperation is part of a big lie, a treadmill to nowhere, the slow desecration of the human soul in the interest of greed and power.

This disease is thick among us now. I can point to some who who suffer completely and wonder why, and even others who suffer completely and believe they are well. I know one man who lives so deeply in his lies that each pitiful move he makes appears to him as progress and light and yet, the smoke and mirrors are everywhere. Titles and false accolades, so he believes, can lift him into places where he does not belong and has earned no place. The tragedy, of course, is how terribly it will drain the last remnants of his withered soul when the truth come clean. And the truth always comes clean. Always.

"When we are unhurried and wise, we percieve that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, -- that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality," Thoreau wrote in _Walden_. And the petty have read this and not noticed it is refering to them. I find this fact curious.

Exposure

2005-07-16T13:22:00.000-04:00

And then it was summer. The Norway maples are putting out a second generation of leaves despite the absence of real rain for weeks now. Even the Catalpa has completed building its massive heart shaped leaves and finished with its lantern-like flowers. The season of copulation has passed and now the slow work of energy gathering begins. In the Pacific Northwest the oceans are too warm this summer. Here in the second week of hurricane season, a second major hurricane has begun winding up its power and strength. Instead of doing the moral and ethical thing two weeks ago, the leaders of the eight major global nations let terrorism blight a promising dialogue. Four suicide bombs in London. No one saw it coming. So much for heightened security. The word of the day for days thereafter was "resolve." Resolve to do what? Hold up a corrupt corporate economy? Continue to institutionalize poverty and criminalize race? The argument the Senators used to make against social welfare programs was that you cannot just give money to people and expect them to be active parts of today's economy. Today I wonder how those aristocrats, all of whom inherited vast fortunes from their forefathers, managed to get off their own asses…and, really, when you get right down to it, did they? It seems their logic doesn't really hold and is really just a thin disguise to justify hierarchy and punish the down trodden. Conservatism in America has lost all of its moral fiber.

But moral fiber is in short supply these days. Even in the remote corners where one would expect to find it, instead there is only fakery and chicanery and insults to the best of our literature. Power, it seems, and narcissism are the only rules. But power and narcissism without the courage to be true to its own impulse. The worst of the worst then, cowardly narcissism, self-interest that pretends benevolence. Cynicism at its worst. Give me a Rick Santorum any day over the kind of posers I've had to deal with for the past two years. Without integrity, without intelligence, without reason or knowledge, tadpoles suckling the last waters of a drying vernal pool. If they don't believe in karma - which they surely do not - they haven't done much self-reflection about a dozen years of failures. And so they lie and pat each other on the back about all the false things they need to hear. It's tragic really, but unsustainable and spiritually depraved. No light there.

And so the energy gathering months are upon us. As Thoreau said, “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” Not false pretense or loyalty or tempered manners, no, goodness. And for some, I can only think: good luck.

Heavy Winds

2005-05-26T10:02:00.000-04:00

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

2005-05-24T10:08:00.000-04:00

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

2005-05-23T10:58:00.000-04:00

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

2005-05-20T09:07:00.000-04:00

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

2005-05-19T13:04:00.000-04:00

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

2005-05-18T09:43:00.000-04:00

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

2005-05-02T09:16:00.000-04:00

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.

Aaaah!

2005-04-29T10:10:00.000-04:00

As spring should feel, precisely; the knowledge of my body, of my genes, my deep memory, the experience of my spirit, they all know this today. This is as it is, and as it should be. There is a green hue in the sunlit air, which is not too warm and not at all humid. The pedals have blown off the first flowers, dogwoods, magnolias, and other exotics, revealing the leaves and fruit coming in underneath. We see the bees have already been busy. The freshness as if today were the first day. Had it looked like this, we can see why life persisted. It is inspiration manifest, the spirited growth of living things. Do our seasons here in New England make us more sensistive the the necessity of cycles and change? Our willingness to bear long trials, but also our delight to revel in the regeneration of spirit, of life, of the Wild all around us. Thaw has come, water flows, life persists, and I am glad of it.

Bedazzled

2005-04-28T09:23:00.000-04:00

Was there ever an Earth not filled with flowers and green leafing plants and trees? Was there ever an atmosphere unpleasant to the skin? It is a season of forgetting, this Spring, of senses so overwhelmed by beauty that the short cold days of winter, the long trial of waiting, the forever anticipation, endless, has been forgotten (or forgiven). An accident on 117 has slowed my pace to that of the saunterer. I can gaze into the wetlands just north of the roadway along the stretch right past the Sudbury border. The forest frame is still visible, but it is fading behind the greening and reddening and flowering tapestry of this eastern Massachusetts forest ecosystem's Spring salute.

Although, we must be mindful that the forest ecosystem is a misnomer; I watch the trees renew from the road, a road, passing houses, behind traffic, we are in the suburbs. This is socially, culturally, economically, hooked to Boston and New York and an urban world of global trade. Our links stretch far past this fading forest frame. This morning, for example, I remembered my time in Buenos Aires. Spring often reminds me of that beautiful southern city. In my mind's eye, the slow walk I would make from Avenida Jorge Newberry down along Avenida Libertador. Hot mornings as I went to teach young business men and women proper ways to make conversation in English, cooled by the spreading branches of enormous towering platano trees. It reminded me of home, those walks, but I didn't know why until returning to New England and seeing the sycamore everywhere. The same tree, different hemisphere. I felt the connection then, but couldn't have spoken it until now. Our links are many across the globe today.

I notice, too, a pleading tone in Bush's speeches these days. Will he make the full conversion before his time is up? We can only hope.

Quenching

2005-04-27T10:16:00.000-04:00

To rise without feeling chilled. Light creeping in through pulled shades at the earliest hours. Today as drizzle followed rain and rain followed drizzle, everything living breathed in another height of richness. A tower of proto-flowers assembled out of the cherry bud, cherry leaf in tow; green flowers on maples soaked in drenching air spit microscopic pollen in a wind assisted copulation. Flowers everywhere, really. White dogwood, pink hued magnolias, forsythias yellowing edges everywhere. I notice the oak take the longest, though. Most of them still hold their winter appearance, but for a ruddiness and slight tinge of green at the edges of their fingered branches. Nature shows off these days; we delight in our luck to participate. With the rains these past days I have noticed the birdsong increases with showers. They celebrate with song the running of the water, the final thaw of springtime.

I read of Howard Dean calling Republicans for what they are and Senator Frist, one of the most underhanded of solipsists, threatening to fulfill their Machiavellian ambitions nonetheless. There is time for protest in the streets. Time to find ourselves united around the principles that stand for our best selves. Do not let them think these ambitions will go unchecked. We can be like the oak, patient and thoughtful, but sturdiest of all in the end.

Transformation

2005-04-26T07:41:00.000-04:00

There's the slow anticipatory creeping of spring, those weeks and months leading out of January through to the spring equinox, when you can feel the energy building. It expressed itself in growing colors on the ends of branches, and spits of green poking up here and there. Past solstice was something like reaching the crest of a hill, in the high Rockies. Now it is as if we have tucked our heads into the wind and life is bursting out from every pore. Trees flower, grass thickens, the bare forest is speckled in an adolescent puberty of fresh new leaves that create the more porous interface with the atmosphere and the universe than winter allows. These intricate majestic forms, these ordered clusters of cells, cooperating. Rains over the weekend soaked the Earth. It is now being sucked up through the wild flora surrounding us and bursting forth as flower, stalk, and leaf. The bare forest will soon disappear. The infancy gives way to rapid youth. The speed of change has risen; the inter-season shows the real prowess of this place, this Earth we share.

And I know in my heart of hearts that it is a loving Earth. A place where everyone puts up a certain stubbornness to survive, but we all, all of us wild, tend to choose those methods that sustain broadly. Pope Benedict does not believe he lives on a loving Earth. Neither does George Bush or Paul Wolfowitz or Condoleeza Rice. Land and landscape is nothing to them but setting. People, merely numbers. Memory and history, mere happen-stance; your mind serves their singular purpose, an abstraction, or your mind is not well. These lost souls have assembled a devious scaffolding amidst the ruin and fear of uncertainty after 9/11. Their agenda is not a life agenda. Look closely, scrutinize them yourselves, I beseech you. This is not about life for them. It is about power and power merely. Look closely, you'll see. These are not the gentle leaves of spring trusting the warm night air to let them spread their surface to the morning star; this is the raw expression of might. These men have something to prove; their souls are empty of this Earth and they have the arrogance to believe that their minds forged in such circumstances have something better to offer. This is what that book meant by false gods.

To the greening landscape, a prayer for peace.

Earth Day

2005-04-22T09:05:00.000-04:00

Lest we forget, if no other day evokes it, let today be the one where you reflect upon the vital connections that link you to your mother Earth. Where are the soils you know? The trees and plants? What wildlife do you see? And those other vistas, where have you gazed across sublime distance, stood awed at mountains of rock, ages of geology? Remember those places and those things and the feelings they evoke in you. We are no longer taught to follow our impulse to love this Earth. Today, of all days, follow it. Here Norway maples burst with green flowers, magnolias at Lincoln Crossing begin to drop the heavy white pedals they showed off this past week. The willows are completely green. Even the Sudbury recedes to its summer channel, fertile fields emerge in its wake. Cultivation has begun. From greenhouse to green Earth in these next few weeks. Where has your food come from today? Your clothing? Your thoughts? As the morning birds cry from the tree tops, reminding each other of plans for the day, let your own soaring spirit connect to the living breathing, pulsing, growing, blooming, springing Earth. Happy day, mother.

And a pox on the house of Bush and Bolton and Rice. Shame on the Senate and the fully corrupted Republican Party. Enjoy these last days, justice will make its revolutions. An Argentinean Naval Officer sentenced to 300 years in prison by Spain for crimes against humanity. He murdered 30 dissenters during the military dictatorship in Argentina; he drugged them and threw them out of an airplane. The world still believes in human rights and humanity, despite the Bush agenda's denial, despite the tenacious anti-humanity of Republican doctrine. Time will turn, seasons will change. I see Norway maple flowers excited to become seed pods and nurture the next generation. I see hope in our springing landscape. Because of this, against the deep persistence that the Wild represents, I find these grasps for power and un-Earthly acts weak like an overbred showdog. Their hips will fail soon enough. Earth will dawn again.

April

2005-04-20T09:19:00.000-04:00

In what can only be called an explosion of life, the trees along 117 between Maynard and Lincoln have blossomed. Flowers everywhere. Green whisps on the oaks, proud white pedals of the dogwood. Red flowering of maple. From the barren Earth, green pedals and flowers filling in the gaps, the fragile light green first layered baby leaf poking out into the warm night air. What information turns this cycle? Light certainly, but temperature must as well. Can the trees count the number of frost-free evenings? This blossoming happened everywhere, all at once. Something shared. These past three days, these past three weeks, something in common. Do we feel it ourselves too?

I have intentionally kept the radio and television and newspaper off. I am full of clutter from the past and haven't the room. It's selfish. The less I think of them, the less harm they can do. It's the thought, the habit of the American way, but not the reality. Conscience knows different. The dogwoods showing their prowess, millions of individual plants at once sending forth the gentle offering of new leaf matter, these are the habits we should know. I would beg them to end this war, but that would only bring them joy. So, I merely point out their disharmonic patterns of logic. And I pray for open eyes.

Saturated

2005-04-11T09:07:00.000-04:00

It was blink, literally, and now everything has begun rigorous sprouting. Trees are blooming early flowers, the Earth itself sends up shoots. I put my hands into the labor of spring this weekend. Culling invasive Norway maples to break open sunlight for an apple tree that has struggled in the understory for a decade or more. I moved rock and soil and the detritus of last year's fall. Building piles of compost, building more soil. Dropping seeds. Today, in the aftermath of scratched skin and newly worked muscles, I can still feel the warmth of yesterday's sun reflecting up and out of my very core. It was more difficult to leave the children this morning, I wanted to take them onto the swollen Sudbury which runs as a very wide lake through Sudbury and Concord. Water and earth have thawed and are recombining. Here I am, working.

In the blissful silence of knowing that small corner of Earth where I live, I thought I sensed an end to this age of hateful conservatism. Not that crimes will not continue to be committed in our name, they will be. But, that an end is in sight. They have made their expression, grasped their power and will challenge us and our children with monumental tasks. But they are finished. I sense.

On Mist and the Magic of Just Listening

2005-04-02T16:12:00.000-05:00

I don't even know where to begin. Was it the way the sun shone across late afternoon yesterday? The way Noah jumped on my stomach this morning. There was something with more flight, more lift, something of an effervescence.

I know I raced too quickly through my favored landscape, where route 117 skirts the boundaries of Maynard and Sudbury and Concord and Lincoln. But I did see the bursting buds of the silver maple, there will be leaves any day now. I have seen the reddening of the whole maple spectrum. And the yellowing of the willows. Even the poplar have a distinct pre-leaf hue. I have seen these. I needed to remember that looking and remembering also required writing. That was my task today. I haven't the time these days. But I needed to begin, and with that spark, those signs, the lifting, I did.

With the wending of conversations that carried a class through a day of discovery. Where the quiet of the forest reminded urban dwellers that they belong in ways they sometimes forget. Through Walden Woods. A tall stand of pine trees, a late adolescent forest of oak and maple and birch. Many shorter pines, just waiting. Well worn paths, but youth in complete silence, practicing contemplation. Remembering what they knew perfectly in their infancy.

Today the mist rolls across the land. The colors are darker greens and greys that remind one of mold and lichen, the oldest life forms. It is a moist smelling forest where ground pine jump to life and pine saplings turn their bark into photosynthesis devices. The season of resurrection, rebirth is well under way. Everywhere, the tongues of grasses and flowers slip up from within the earth into the warmth of sunlight. Everywhere, life.

We will win as we are righteous in our ways. No more finding fault with others without the sincerity of our own devotion. I will scramble and race to assure that truth is a regular expression, that it lifts us and enhances our truest gift, the knowledge of wildness.

"In Wildness is the preservation of the world." Henry David Thoreau, "Walking"

Hiatus

2005-03-29T15:40:00.001-05:00

The spring progresses with an alacrity that thrills the senses. I wish that I had more stolen moments to recall and reflect. However, I fear I must pause my daily reflections for one month while the unfortunate realities of economic necessity consume my every waking hour. Please check back often, but do not expect regularity until after April 26.

Know, however, that every thought must be to unseat these madmen and turn a tide toward better days.

Peace.

Retreat

2005-03-22T16:51:00.000-05:00

The snow melted back over the weekend and beneath the layer of frozen snow the daffodils have been growing. They are bigger than they were before the snow. They embrace the principle of persistence and hope, the true reflection of nature. The early morning drive along 117, sun rising higher every day, the sweet two note chime of the chickadee's spring song, wildlife stirring, each threat of snow made by the local weatherman is merely cause for chuckle. The ominous weight of winter has truly passed now. Days are longer than nights and will be for six more months. Joy fills the recesses of my heart and the landscape all at once. We are light loving creatures. We know its strength. Even those of us embracing night, only do so in firm rejection of our truer condition, aware of the delicious abnormality of sunless life, thrill-seekers. I welcome spring.

They say that sometimes a negative thought must be expressed to clear the idea out of the air itslef. I look at George Bush and everything he stands for and hope against hope that this is such an expression. Get these thoughts out of the air, clear the way for true enlightenment. Old, worn, tired ideas about dogma and the evil that men do, doctrines imagined by callous men trying to protect an institution, afraid of the true potential of true men. Perhaps we must be forced to regress in this way if only to see how much better we really know than that. One cannot escape the weight of their own deeds. And so it is with George.

Marching

2005-03-18T09:01:00.001-05:00

It is Marching. Every day over the same well-worn roads, thaw pulling chunks of asphalt, leaving potholes filled with watery grit. Trees with elbows and hands like branches reaching out across the road, oaks leaning perilously. Redding buds. A majestic sunlight paints highlights across the expanse of field between me and the distant Wood. The Sudbury river, flat like a roadway wends itself through the landscape, a black stripe still lined with snow, placid, the perfect mirror for the sky above. Giant white expanse of still-snow-covered Farrar Pond, a former wend in the Sudbury River, an ancient oxbow. These last days of winter with spring rising are days of hope expressed in Nature. Earth renewed, the resurrection. The dogwoods near Dougherty's Garage in Lincoln glow a soft green now as their fuzzy buds prepare to burst into flower. I will miss the passing season, the open forest, the trees fully naked, the vision afforded, and the insights allowed, but I welcome the rising life. March has come and we are marching.

Amidst these changes in my place, I smell a rising tide of dissent. A quarter million chime in in one day to save Alaska. A public relation's buzz more thoughtful and better timed than the disaster the Bush team has led us into. I see cracks in the armor now, I hear the quiet rising of opposition. Keep your ear to the ground and your voices loud, the tsunami of Truth is on its way.

Light

2005-03-17T07:03:00.000-05:00

Bare boned trees back lit by the rising sun watering my eyes as I journey east along 117 appear almost mystical. There are new birdsongs in the air. The long row of 100 year old silver maple trees lining the south edge of Verril Farm have all pushed their buds into several generations, opening their chlorophyl-filled cells slowly, but deliberately. Nothing green there yet, but we know it's almost ready. There is something peaceful about sunlight at 6:00 a.m., something majestic about the way towering white pines glow in its light and soften further the softness of the early morning sky. Three hawks in 24 hours, one right over the top of my house. There is, it seems, much I should be paying attention to these days. The melting opening landscape, this greening Earth, the slow return of motion, living motion, perceptible.

Two years ago today, George Bush made his final threat of war. His destiny in infamy cast by this foolish and careless imperialism. George Bush, who recovered his reputation from the wallows of alcohol abuse and cocaine use to convince a nation of un-critical Christians that his way was God's way, has no business in that office any longer. His illegal war must stop. He must be brought to justice for launching it. I hear rumors of Pinochet coming to justice, at last. Even mumbles that Kissinger's time will come. The slow, almost imperceptible movement of life convinces me that each of these criminals will pay in time. There is little to justify the intentional perpetuation of war and fear and hate.

The Trees and I

2005-03-16T08:48:00.000-05:00

The way the wind ripples through the bare branches of the trees this morning makes them look alive. Are they reaching for something? The constant motion, if you stop and look, reminds us that our machines and our technologies and our organizations are but pale imitations of the greater context where they were made. There is nothing wild in a computer, nothing living, nothing growing. The wind blows and the computer does not bend. This living world, this is where our life is sourced; this the true rhythm. The trees dance, then, and I notice, and between us we agree.

We despise the greed and corruption. We despise the men who stole tax dollars to build a failing highway underneath Boston, and the recently convicted CEO who lied to everyone about his company and left thousands to pay the price with their retirements and savings. We despise the lying alcoholic in the White House who kills and calls it justice, who steals and calls it parity, who runs a government so far away from our founding ideals that Jefferson and Hamilton must be rolling in their graves. We despise the petty, trite, and listless people who collect paychecks for doing no work and then complain about being underpaid; and those who destroy the lives of millions around the globe for want of goods and then complain if anyone says the real word Justice. We are tired of the lies and deception that so many carry as their front. We long for real, true, people. We long for those who avoided the selfishness trap cultivated by this culture, for honesty and integrity and virtue. May I please, in my lifetime, meet a truly virtuous man? This century doesn't appear to be fertile ground.

And so the wind ripples through and the sun rises higher and we beg to the Universe for a sign of change in this frozen arctic of a national culture.

Sunlight

2005-03-15T07:32:00.000-05:00

Long shadows as the sun creeps up over the crest of the forest. The air is fresh today. The clouds light. The oppression of cold winter aridity and biting winds feels like a distant memory, but for the snow still covering the ground. I heard a robin singing with joy at the sunrise. I move with lighter steps in this atmosphere, waiting for a warm wind to kiss my face with the promise of summer. The wisdom of trees is proven now, as running water and warming air greet their already opening buds. The slow seasonal tilt toward sunlight crests a milestone on Sunday when spring officially arrives, but we're close enough now to truly feel it. It not only warms us, it feed us, sending its rays into the chlorophyl of plant matter, providing the energy that fuel photosynthesis, the miracle of sugar production, the foundation of life itself. As the tall pines seem to smile in the basking warmth of sunrise, I feel at home, content, in place in nature. The spring also rises in me.

And so, the violence being perpetrated by Washington, the killing and the stealing and the installation of middle class poverty as a way of life in the United States seems contrary to the very goals of life itself. Nature must cringe at the condition, I cringe for Earth. These men who wrap themselves in flags and pretend to stake out morality are evil men. They say the terrorists require these evils, but they are the terrorists. They terrify me, diminish my children's future, harm my parents' well-being, pull rugs out from under my siblings, offend my neighbors, and bring a shame to our great nation. My slow persisent resistence to their evil ways, like the buds opening slowly, awaits a true springtime of culture in this country, it hopes for the sunlight of truth, a solstice for our better selves.

Blue Monday

2005-03-14T09:14:00.000-05:00

The weekend was snowy, but felt less winter than any snow previous in the season. When the cold drops low, the air grows less humid and there is a sense that the very fiber of reality is stretched just that much too tight. A needle poke here, or a slight tear there and the whole structure could collapse in on itself. There is, in these moments, just barely enough matter to hold things together. But this past weekend, the wet spring snow evoked the very opposite sensation. It was as if the world was too full, overfull. There was heavy wet snow on the ground, heavy wet snow on the trees, heavy wet snow in the air. It felt full, this world. And today, the sun rising bright well before 6:00 a.m. and the air slowly warming against the still snow-covered Earth, I feel a passing of winter. Six more days, on the solar calendar, but, to me, it was over as of this weekend, when spring dictated the quality of storm.

The crisp blue sky alludes to clarity. But we learn that clarity is the last thing our President would like us to attain. Faked news reports generated by the administration lie about the situation in Iraq and the need for the terrible legislation they keep championing. I have my fingers crossed that the very weight of their thoughtless arrogance will crush them. How many more of us have to die before that happens?

The quiet changes

2005-03-11T10:37:00.000-05:00

The morning greeted me with bitter cold again today, although temperatures have risen into the just below freezing mark. I heard a single bird, a common bird whose name I do not know, crying out as the sun came up. I watched the temperature rise. The sun shone for less than half an hour before becoming slowly eclipsed by thickening clouds. Another snow storm, just about upon us now. I worried earlier in the winter that the ground would be too dry coming into spring. No worries now. Another warm spell is around another corner. Slowly the new layer of snow will melt, saturating Earth. This cold will lift. The birds will no longer complain.