in thirty minutes, in fall

All in thirty minutes, dodging rust and glass from

Last century’s middens,

The low-angled sun on the river backlights

The floating insect particles,

Still speckling the fall-

And the twig in my pocket that matches

The bobcat tracks, pad to toe,

One carefully inside the other,

Piercing my hip-

And the aging gray birch who

Seems a magnet,

Drawing a flock of goldfinches

Suddenly, like static,

    whose cheeky caps have dropped

so as to  disappear, becoming

The old birch’s golden leaves-

So I, coming in,

Gathering about me four heavy blankets who have

Seen who knows what all day,

 am so quickly laden.

a small dusk poem

I do not doubt that the old oaks speak.
Or that the biting dear wind
knows my cheek in particular.
Here in the dim gray dusk
the ground knows my knees,
and the white pine sentinels
are my unmetaphorical guard.

Merleau-Ponty writes
we know ourselves at the crossing of our worlds,
where one hand embraces the other.
outer meets inner-

But I know myself in the
body of the land, at the
edge of my skin. Or rather,
I forget myself
and am remembered.

sunrise in late october

Sun rise in late October is a gift – it happens now around seven am, giving the chance to wake up at a perfectly reasonable hour and still feel as though you’ve snuck upon something exquisite, unblemished. The world is already happening at four am in July – the robins seem as though they’re having mid-morning tea by that time. We feel we've already got to catch up a bit. But now, it’s just a solitary crow, or jay, who to me touch the small sharpness, the caution, the mystery, of an owl’s hoot. Crows fit into the veil-time, and though their call to some is grating, it doesn’t split the dawn. It coats it, if anything.

This morning, waking to the opening gray light, I felt myself padding slowly to the kitchen, without realizing why. I felt I was about to catch something. And I had the distinct feeling it was Christmas morning. That I was before the morning, and therefore knew something spectacular was about to happen. Come December, of course, there will be a deeper quiet and, I hope, blankets of still snow. That is what affords these fall mornings a special secret joy – there is still noticeable color and life. When the sun rises it glorifies still-gold maples, and makes the oaks and beeches glow amber. The geese are moving and some hardy ones persist in the garden. There is yet a pulsing in fall, cheerful activity, though you can feel the gentle slowing.

And perhaps that's it, that's the delight and ease that comes with these risings. Now, more than before, we are with the season. We come to life with the dawn and the world, and perhaps it is easier to feel attuned. I suppose there are more summery folks out there, who rise chirping and fluttering. It may be a constitution sort of thing, but I think it's more than that. There is a mystery to late fall mornings, a quieting, that feels like a storyteller has begun to whisper. There is a twinkle in her eye, and you have to still yourself -- lean in close... closer to hear the secret revealed. 

It is tantalizing, but also gentle and kind, that we don’t come to a halt, but get to turn around a bit and listen closely before settling down. And wake up to the careful dawn.

in fall

By the river the thrice-banded woolly one is a sparkling bristle, black so shiny it glows white, or luminous. I am too close and so it begins to curl, but I back off soon enough. It lifts its head apparent (it is perfectly symmetrical to my eyes), and rears, a tiny fuzzy sausage stallion.

And Hamlet arches to dip his stripes in the river, white flag tail rudder.

I pull one stiltgrass plant from the leersia.

Yesterday up the mountain we find molars and claws, tiny, in scat. Dried, white scat – just compact fur and bone. The pine needles are sharp on the bouldered sunlit summit, and the moss is lightening, letting go, now unhinged tiny carpet islands. At the vista, under sweet white pines, we watch two red-tails riding thermals. There are oaks at the top, too, and all seems thick and durable and dry and tannic. My lips begin to parch.

Under shade the boulders are soft enough with moss and needles, angled gently and we nap. There are whistles from a far-off playing field.

The descent follows stream-bed or game trails, no blazes, and we are in ferns and hemlocks, that “forest” green, and a toppled hop hornbeam taken by the grapes. It is tangled, and could be a dragon’s nest. One woodpecker. The last bridge is old and strong, with the numbers “548” in metal on one of the stringers – this great post lodged in earth and moss used to stand with hawks.

the end is the beginning

This is the new year, and the beginning starts with loss. A talk with a mediator who specializes in helping communities transition through loss and embrace new identities has me awestruck at seasonal coincidence.[1]

All around there is the subtle change in palette, now, a bronzing, the russet of an apple, but all over our woods. Here and there a young red maple has decided to dive deep and early, and is crimson from crown to trunk. The aspens are golden.

I was cold sitting outside today, feeling more distinctly the exact location of my furnace, decidedly not in my extremities. And a birthday poem by Mary Oliver spoke about the trees turning themselves to torches. The wind doesn’t set the trees to roaring, yet, like they will in October, when they will actually gesticulate by sending their own leaves falling. But they more than rustle, now – is there a word? It has sibilance to it, with an ‘x’ in there, too. It’s not raucous, yet.

But this is the beginning, this is my new year. Technically, too – seed is set, buds are born, and dormancy is merely growth, inside-out. We all know the wisdom of cycling, by now, but I’ve just begun to understand the importance of the order of it all. Now is when we plant our bulbs. Spring is resurgence: “re.”

The maple who decides to go for it, to burn up, to set its buds and immolate, has it right. It’s right there in the word: decide. Cidere, to cut. De, away from, out of, of, etc. To cut away. From the misty infinity of potential, choosing means loss. Beginning means loss. First the leaves let go, then comes the buds’ dormancy, then the leafing.

It is still taboo to grieve at the beginning, because, I think, grief gets mistaken for a lack of gratitude. Just like when we’re scolded for feeling angry – how ungrateful. But the loss is right there, and often it’s first, and when it’s holding us, begging to be seen, our energy can’t go into what’s been chosen.

Like how we prune our apple trees, cutting the water sprouts, those endless, perfectly vertical spikes you can see on a neglected old tree. And corn suckers, and calendula blossoms, like lilac sprays. Prune them, direct the energy, and multiply the fruit. Deciding to bear fruit, and bear it well, means choosing, and that means cutting. Which always, always needs to heal.

What if weddings, those ultimate cultural beginnings, recognized the necessary end and accompanying grief that comes with something new? When you choose your person, you cut away all other potential. What if this were acceptable to acknowledge, and made the choice wiser, sweeter?

My dear friend Cella described to me looking into the face of her newborn, and the depth and purity of the sadness, and the love, that welled up- it was magnificent and overwhelming. I wonder, and it’s just wondering, that even at the very beginning, that extraordinary, finite specificity of a new being brings the understanding of loss. I have no idea what this means. I just marvel at the maple trees.

---

[1] See Ken Downes Consulting, www.kendownes.com

the fifth season

The sounds this time of year sure are funny. It’s no wonder traditional Chinese medicine, with similar seasonal cycling, calls late summer the fifth season, when growth comes to a plateau, fruit sets, and all is still for just a bit. The outward, upward yang meets inward, reflective yin who will bring rest and let us fallow, and for a bit they overlap. What an auditory overlap!

The raucous celebration of summer visitors has mostly disappeared – the warblers are all gone, though I still see flycatchers and swallows. The cedar waxwings are flocking, now – along with the turkeys – and their unmistakable high-pitched ‘tseee’ is greatly amplified. They’ll be descending on anything with fruit (they are entirely fruititarians) pretty soon, leaving a laden honeysuckle bare.

It’s the mornings that are most different, with no more robins querying at dawn. The general uproar has quieted and old friends, here all along, have come back to the fore. Most notably the jays and the crows, who seem to have the reigns again. It’s a funny thing, a jay scolding over a slow and lazy ka-tee-did. A chickadee calling, not singing, while picking ripe tomatoes. And yesterday of all things I heard my personal bell of winter, the nuthatch’s puttering ‘yank!’ All while watering beds still full of flowering Echinacea, black-eyed susan, and daisy. The cardinals sing all summer, but now they have no competition in the thrushes and wrens for virtuoso status.

I think it’s just me – my ears are ready to hear the full-time residents again. I’ve luxuriated in the fancy and exotic and now I’m happy for jays and crows – the trees will take the lead in sensation, now.  A hillside of golden aspen and firey sugar maple – what punctuates that better than a jay? A thrush would be audacious, a gilded lily.

Before that happens, though, we have a plateau – we can watch the squash plump up and relax, a bit. Feel the last push of growth and sniff the oncoming chill, but slowly. Revel in the overlap, the fifth season. 

follow your word-path

Just a few disjointed ideas, but they feel as though they might, before too long, Become Something Interesting. For now they are utterly unrefined and potentially incomprehensible (sometimes the most entertaining things are).

Yes the way out is through, and words can be boots.

The grasp of pen or striking of keys become footsteps. They’re tethered in the smallest visible ways to that well within, and we are surveyors in the deepest spaces.

When you walk through the woods to monitor a plot, there is a tool that fastens to your belt, and drops a string that marks your path. So words, these ink blots (or virtual footpaths) are these traceable lines, and we drop them because we cannot see the whole from the start.

They trace our mire and make a path, they are the guide, the walking stick, the breadcrumb story. “A poem begins with delight and ends with wisdom,” says Mr. Frost. So it is, there is a spark, that conceptual butterfly. Or, rather, it is the actual butterfly who brings us into a heretofore unknown conceptual clearing.

But we have to follow it, we have to pick up our feet and go, through. But our hands can take us there, words can take us there. To the well within that thoughts fly in circles above but writing can penetrate, can skip us out of thought-ruts… and perhaps if we’ve slogged well enough we find that our own well hits a common aquifer.

That aquifer that waters us all, and the words of one can be a map that enables others a momentary deep, replenishing drink. A short cut, a word-path!

But you have to follow, and go through. Write with abandon. Wander. 

Just remember to bring a snack.

we need rain

We need rain. There have been a couple of passing showers, enough to soften the cracking grass a bit and to plump the leaves just slightly, but not nearly enough to satisfy or invigorate. The neighbor’s flowering dogwood has all but folded in on itself, pointed leaves with deep parallel veins now rolled together like little papery cones, all silver underside. The lilac that bakes in full sun beside the raspberries is limp and rattling – its velvet triangle leaves have little protection, with no thick cuticle like the oaks. The jewelweed, some of which already have their mottled orange flowers that look like gnome caps, is tired and far from its vigorous, succulent self. Our corn, too, is stunted – two feet tall and already tassled out. The peppers seem to hold up alright, and the maples.

But there are those hearty ones too who are showing their stress. Roadside sumac, their peaked fruit still ripening, are starting to burn scarlet, and an oak sapling in our yard has ruddy tips. What is a showy and blazing and beautiful decline in September and October seems like an SOS now (we see neon everywhere, now, but it seems to me without chemicals sumac and sunset must be the brightest colors anywhere). But interesting, to me, is how this early, spotted shift allows me to try on the next season. A month ago it would have seemed unthinkable, exhausting even, to think about lush green maples wearing their crimsons and golds. But now I’ve progressed enough, perhaps, to settle into it – to see scarlet and let my mind wander to spice, to squash, to crunching leaves. I stoke my figurative beard and think, ‘yes, interesting.’

It is at these times of dry weather especially that I think about the underneath of trees. That they have a mirror image, or nearly, anchoring them in their vast swaying greatness. I wonder where the water table is, and whose toes are still wet, whose roots have enough energy to reach a bit further, whose roots hairs are clinging by toes to their roots, reaching and sipping. It is the old ones, usually, who reach the greatest depths. The ones with great height have big ropey taproots, and I wonder what it must be like for ones whole enormous, old body to live in such extremes. Imagine, your hands one hundred feet in the sky, parallel to hawks, fingers catching hot sun, great stormy wind. And your toes in topsoil, mineral soil, and down down to cold bedrock, sweet pure groundwater. All manner of creatures burrowing, laying, digging, digesting, transforming. When I sip cold water it starts at my tongue and cools my chest; the enormous elm would feel just the opposite.

It reassures me, the big old ones who’ve tapped so firmly in the ground beneath them. I root for the saplings, too, though they will have to earn their stripes. At least when they are stressed, and thirsty, and tired, their blushing is brilliant and beautiful. But we do need rain.

remembering summers

Two years ago yellow warblers built a nest in the roses outside of the ranger cabin at North Hero State Park in Lake Champlain. Two years ago we were a nest, the five of us, woven and resting and thriving. The scene I wrote down two years ago could be titled ‘nighttime in a cabin,’ or ‘Living in Community,’ but also ‘blow up your TV.’ There is magic in a summer night, the only sounds breathing, turning pages, crickets outside and a moth against a screen.

The haunting cry of calling loons,

A cabin in the woods.

Pages turn in yellow light,

Stillness here imbued.

Friends with eyes held fast in books

Have bodies calmly cast

In different patterns, folded deep,

A presence formed in past.

Nighttime beckons, darkness calls,

As words bind friends in pulsing thrall.

or

Their bodies are shadows,

The lines and patterned limbs

Cast by thrall and rapture.

Substance lying in stories, bodies

are echoes, afterthoughts,

They are

Formed inside pages.

siren thrushes

All things that grow are, this time of year, sending their energy upwards, outwards – to grow, to fruit, to leaf, to disperse… This includes myself, and I find the majority of my time is spent in simple absorption and observation, rather than reflection and synthesis. That, and my there is so much to do! The tomato plants are in, albeit a few days before the ordained date of May twenty-first, the official ‘post-frost’ day in New England. Today we sow kale and more lettuce, along with peas, as the first crop has been thoroughly nibbled. Needless to say, we also have to build a fence.

But I still have the early mornings, and they are for birds. This morning, specifically, was for thrushes. They are the sirens of the woods, and I have been drawn in to no avail countless times. They dwell in the woods, and are for the most part dull and rusty colored, and as such evade viewing nine times out of ten. Ten out of ten for me – I’ve never seen a hermit thrush, a wood thrush, or even a veery. They might be like an avian Echo, for all I know, made up entirely of haunting, ethereal sound. Their voices are so extraordinary they don’t need anything else of note – one might think with voices as enchanting they’d have to be dressed to the nines, with foot-long plumes and scarlet eggs or some such thing. But that would be altogether too much. Leave the colors to the warbler who sounds like a squeaky wheel.

Sometimes you’ll hear the thrushes without having to venture off your path – wood thrushes can be heard along roadsides, and I’ve heard veeries in more open wet places. Apparently hermit thrushes will come to trails in the woods, but I’ve never seen one there. You can hear them a long ways off, but I’ve found I have to get deeper into the woods to be really surrounded by their song.

This morning I was the luckiest I’ve been listening to thrushes. I sat on an old stump in a typical New England forest, beeches wrapped around old barbed wire, clearings here and there from logged white pines, low blueberries growing up in the openings… One can’t just go searching for the thrushes – they’re sirens, recall. You don’t need to strap yourself to a mast, or stump, but you do have to sit, and simply let them sing. As I settled down the thrushes started up, first the veery to my left, all fluted waterfall. The two words you’ll hear in any description of thrush song are ‘flute-like’ and ‘ethereal.’ Both are true, but they’re a bit vague. The veery is four downward spiraling trills, the first two starting higher than the last two. All thrushes sound like wind chimes, multi-toned and metallic, but the veery adds a lovely courseness, and almost an urgency. Imagine those carved wood frog instruments – when you rake their back it sounds like a frog’s trill. Add that to a wind chime, and you’ve got the veery.

Then I heard the wood thrush, or three, coming from a bit deeper in the woods. They sound like a wind chime giggling, though I’m told you can listen for the definitive ‘ee-o-lay!” pattern within their rather tripping call. Finally came the hermit thrush, the first I’ve heard this year. I’m surprised – I thought I’d have to go a bit farther north to hear her in the summer (they winter in the Carolinas). I’m thrilled, too, because their call is undoubtedly my favorite. How do you possibly describe it? It might as well be the eternal voice of the Woods herself. It is not urgent, or hurried, or really even playful. It is better described as plaintive, though melancholy is more apt.  A long introductory note, the flute, and then trace the chimes with your hand, but slowly. Mournful? Not quite, it’s not the loon or the mourning dove. It’s more restful than that, and it doesn’t ask a question. It is expressive, not seeking. And the magic therein is that when you really, really listen to a hermit thrush’s song, she has induced that very spirit in you.

It’s hard to hold on to that expressive stillness, with peas to be planted and errands to be run. But the thrushes will hold it for us, and we can return to the woods again another morning.

on robins

 The mere sight of an American robin isn’t the first sign of spring, although the Audubon here in Massachusetts gets calls all winter reporting errant and harbinger robins. Many individuals do over-winter, changing to a diet of berries instead of worms and moving deeper into the forest. But all the particulars change in the spring, and they become my backdrop – something so simple and clear and honest it’s always already happening before I realize it. I have moved into spring, already, and I stop in my tracks and realize the evening robins have brought me there.

Their plumage changes in the spring, like many birds. But it’s a bit subtler than the noticeable brightening and blackening of the goldfinch: the bill brightens to sunflower yellow and the red breast gets deeper and ruddier. They get a bit of flash, especially when combined with the two outer white patches visible on their tails as they streak away from lawns with their woodpecker-esque trumpeting. They wear white-ringed monocles, and their dapper gray backs and long thrush tails make them appear as though they’ve put on their morning suits, all three pieces with a cheeky red vest.

We see them now on lawns, pulling worms from wet earth. They seem to me always clumsily avoiding some kind of amusing mishap, because yes, they hop like most birds, but they also kind of run. They actually scamper about. I haven’t been able to find much research or basic information on songbirds who seem to run around, but it seems to me it makes sense for a larger songbird who spends a good deal of time on the ground. Hopping takes a heck of a lot more energy than speed-walking. Try it.

So T. migratorius is a sight for the eyes, but more profoundly he is a wake-up call for our inner ears. Their song is a somewhat clumsy, liquid four-part question, to me. You’ll see it written as ‘cheerio, cheerily, cheerio, cheerily.’ It is most definitely thrush – there is a depth and clarity to it, though nothing like its cousins the hermit or veery. It’s not long and impressive, like the operatic song sparrow, or multi-toned like the boreal thrushes. It’s not absolutely unmistakable like, say, the towhee (‘drink your tea!’), as the gray catbird can sound like a robin, perhaps after a bit of champagne. But nobody sings you into twilight like the robin. They are quintessentially crepuscular, singing loudest before dawn and after dusk. They’ll sing when almost all the light is gone from the sky, and it’s the cheeriest sound I know. It’s the activity gentle but bright enough to offer allowance that our own can stop. Someone has taken the reigns for the day, and off we can drift. 

Their evening song is taps, for me, but not the sort that brings tears. It’s the taps we sang at camp – “day is done, gone the sun…” Reverence with the corners of one’s lips turned up, no great heartbreak, just rest. And a bit of a chuckle, because they are pretty silly.

while i was away

from 3.10

Stones and beeswax on a quite pretty table, all the hurts and haunts pressing. But there are plum blossoms blooming on my windowsill, and they, even, were pruned. They were cut off because they were not the Best For the Tree, and here they are blooming in a small blue cup with a little water. And the cup is broken, too, it’s an accidental vase. It still has its white patches without glaze where the handle fell off, but I just turned it around.

They bloomed while I was away. I left them greening and stretching, and I looked at them every day. I leaned over all my books and made sure they were not thirsty. It was even hard to see, because their little cup is blue, and you know so is water. But then I went away, and when I did not look at them they opened. So when I came back it was just a little thing, it was all theirs. It didn’t take my proud look for every each petal to be a miracle of spring.

But I rescued you, didn’t I? I picked you up and chose you so especially based on the size of your cup and the size of my windowsill and your perfect asymmetry I thought was most reverent but Not Too Proper. I quickly with sneaking smile copied nature, I brought awe inside and articulated it, didn’t I?

I wonder if I will notice each one wilting.

leaving the webs

There are webs in most of the corners of our house. Some are simply lines that span the edges of the window, rainbow threads I only notice at certain times on sunny days. Others are bigger and well developed – those have become fixtures, as much as the pictures we’ve hung on purpose. My favorite looks like a kite, above the kitchen sink. It’s fastened on three sides, its complexity concentrated about the middle, and so takes on the appearance of a box kite, all filigree continually airborne. Some of these webs are active, some probably aren’t – I rarely see their makers, except scuttling around the floor here and there.

I realize at some point I’ll need to wipe the slate clean – things could get rather Great Expectations-y. But I love them, and I love sharing the space with spiders. It seems a worthy compromise, for all the good work they do. And, luckily for me and thanks to my mother, spiders have ceased to be a source of fear or surprise (most of the time). Instead they’ve taken on traditionally mythic proportions. Like Charlotte, spiders are wise weavers, creators; they are storytellers. A web is a trap, surely, for prey as well as all flights of the imagination. A number of American Indian myths have Spider weaving the first alphabet, giving humans the written language.

I lived for a while in Seattle with a fairly large spider in the corner of my bathroom. She was an excellent exercise in patience and understanding, because she was BIG: probably three inches in diameter, including big ol’ legs. I love spiders, but they will make you draw your breath. Every morning I had to confront my initial reaction and take the time to see her. Then to thank her. I finally let her out, as I don’t think there was much of an insect food supply among the tile. Doors long shut in one’s brain can be opened, I’ve found, by letting something scary be. By dwelling along side it.

Besides the individual inspiration the spiders bring, I like the fact that insects find reason to take up residence. The health of an ecosystem can often be measured by the presence of predators, as such it’s an excellent sign that we’re due to get our mountain lions back in twenty or thirty years (in the words of famed tracker Susan Morse, “don’t build, and they will come”). I don’t (or do I?) necessarily want catamounts lurking behind the sofa, but I am glad we’ve got some complexity in the house. Clean is good, sterile is terrible. If we go to the trouble of tossing out all the detritus, literal and metaphorical, nothing grows. I’m reassured that we’ve got teensy bacteria and particles to feed the ones who feed the ones who feed the spiders. Then we’re living, and cycling, and changing.

There’s great precedent and expectation to strive for perfect cleanliness in the places we dwell – our psychological space included. But health is balance, not an inert extreme. Things that die take a while to break down and re-filter, and they’ve got to linger a bit amongst the living. That’s when the spiders will set up shop, and weave the most wonderful webs.

Change is a tonic

The few times I have gone away from New England I have always ended up feeling parched and stagnant. We grow according to our topography, I think, and often underestimate its effects. This is not to say that we cannot adapt, and that certain landscapes cannot offer us an expected release, reprieve, or connection. My friend Erin grew up on a pear farm in California, and found the sage scrub-steppe of Colorado disconcerting at first, and then extraordinarily liberating. She then felt like she needed to take deeper breaths when she transplanted herself to the dense vegetation of western Washington state.

The grandeur of the Pacific Northwest was what I couldn’t take. The overwhelming lushness. Maybe that means I’ve taken the puritan aversion to self-indulgence too far, but there it is. Everything is bigger, taller, wider, rougher – more extreme. Take Acer macrophylum, the maple out there. ‘Macrophylum’ means “large leaf,” and they are, actually, bigger than your face. The trees themselves are often two hundred feet tall, all a-covered with draping moss. Western hemlocks tower over our eastern ones, and the shrub vegetation of the forest floor is dense and can grow to eight or more feet. Much of it is green all winter, and when you rise up over any old hill there’s the jagged, fourteen-thousand-plus foot peak of Rainier. There’s only so much gasping one can do.

It may seem odd that one could feel something like ‘parched’ in a region as notoriously wet and verdant as the Northwest. What I craved was the quick and magnificent turning and cycling of New England. The distinct and dramatic nature of our four (or more) seasons has become a circadian rhythm for me, and as years tick by I notice and begin to understand my own periods of dormancy and fruition. Change, these cycles of death and birth and death, a thousand times a day, are the stuff of life. I have finally recognized the great myth of the upward, linear climb, finally reaching an inert and stable plateau for the great illusion it is. It’s more a messy sine wave, I suppose. What I fear is not failure but stagnation (well, I’m sure I feel failure a bit, still).

All landscapes change, of course. The desert for some is as inspiring and evocative as any other place, and the Pacific Northwest squirms and roots and fruits and changes, too. But I’ve set my clock by New England, and the springing robins at dawn open something, always, in my chest. I’ve adhered my own weather to our own barometer, and now I need thunderstorms. And the sound of sap thumping the bottom of the bucket, the great humidity of summer, fireflies, a ponderous winter. I need rock walls to train my eyes through a naked deciduous forest, to see what’s bare and stark in myself. And then a floor of warmed pine needles to bring a languid rapture.

who speaks for spring?

“Spring is like a perhaps hand,” says e. e. cummings, whose poem of that title goes on to evoke an ethereal jack frost-of-the-spring, lightly and kindly undoing his work. A blush of rose here, a quiet hand quickening the willows to bright gold. The ‘veil of green,’ as my father put it, which appears when buds swell. This image is often used—the maiden of spring – as opposed to the bold, brazen, boisterous matron of summer and harvest. The one with wild hair and twinkling eyes, who produces tomatoes and pumpkins and corn and honey – all things outlandishly fertile. She is delicate spring, come of age and fruitful. Round and rowdy and overflowing.

Maybe it’s because I haven’t felt the abundance of summer in almost a full solar orbit – the feeling that every inch of space is not only alive but brimming – but it seems to me spring is as bright and daring and messy as anything else this year. Snowdrops appeared full and hearty, thrown suddenly amidst dead leaves and hummus. The grass has greened, unabashedly, overnight. There are grackles, blackbirds – the icterids are home. Daffodils don’t coyly lift their heads, blushing with attention, either. They do what they look like they should – they trumpet. The whole world is blaring, just like the crepuscular robins. But that’s for the next entry. Let us say for today that robins (some individuals of which do, in fact, overwinter, changing their diet from worms to berries) are cheerful, evocative, social, and extremely demanding of your attention come dusk. And soon, come four o’clock in the morning.

All this blaring and wild waving of blossoms and beaks makes me doubt the ‘maiden’ idea. It all seems twinklingly sneaky to me, but kind. Maybe spring is a coyote, but she’s wiser than that. The archetypal hag? Clarisa Pinkola Estes is an anthropologist and storyteller, who has championed the wise old woman. She lives in muck and dirt, the edge where things die, only to be transformed. A conjurer of bones, a seamstress of flesh.

There’s a touch of all forms in spring – that is the magic of the ‘edge’ of a season, where you can see all things in one. But when I see the alien purple tentacles of skunk cabbage reach out of the ooze, see the snowdrops bust out of leaves and mud – I hear bright laughter, and something that resembles a happy cackle.

the return

The world is white today, perfectly fitting for the first of March. One of our only true winter snowstorms, and it piles up on the lids of the sap buckets. The birds are in-between, too. They are trying on their breeding plumage, without fully committing. I notice it most in the goldfinches, whose dusty olive backs are getting yellower, whose bright white wing bars seem more striking and defined. I've seen one who almost has his black cap fastened. The cardinals' beaks are brighter, too, and the house finches' salmon-purple back patches show up like flashes against the snow. But it's still only the winter inhabitants I see - the warblers are a ways off.

Persephone will come back, soon. She and Demeter and Hecate have popped up around me lately, in reading and conversation, and it's got my mind on pomegranates. And as I write there is one male cardinal, all contrast and vitality.

I want to be baptized with pomegrates,

blood-red, of this world.

I want what is not purification,

But what will take me under -

An unction from inside cells and muscle.

I want to crush crisp rubies

on leathery skin,

Not the unknowing velvet of birth.

No, and the sticky red will stain

my gray hair.

It will trace wrinkles

and stick, stuck and unseemly.

If there are rotten gems they

Too, crush them too.

I want it all, faceted ovary -

And also I will be the one to do it.

Two winds, and March

Last night there were two winds, and we were like Janus, facing two directions. One came from winter, bitter and cold and driving. The other so intoxicatingly warm, gentle - almost humid. It was a May breeze, ahead of April and March all at once. We must have been on the edge of a front, though I felt on the edge of time itself.

It seems like a sneaking, tripping allowance, an indulgence. A great gasp of YES when weather and time stand firmly in two places at once. This is the truth of it, always, but to be so bold about it is startling and exciting. Oh yes, contradiction! To stand outside of the linear, to dwell in the great embracing paradox!

It stops the story, at any rate. The temptation to categorize and narrate, in order that we understand ourselves more exactly and logically. “It is winter, still, just below freezing but soon the buds will swell.” But here there are leaves on the shrubs, and there on the north side the ground is still covered in ice. My mother saw the redwing blackbirds, but jays still call like they own the place.

I suppose the greater trajectory is still linear, overall, and these patterns are reassuring (the fact that it’s all shifting to ‘sooner’ and ‘warmer’ is alarming, indeed). They provide the solid ground, the background landmarks by which we measure our progress. We locate ourselves through the temporal, meteorological myths and memories of our landscapes.

But ‘both at once’ is precious, and perhaps that’s the greatest gift of March, the infamously fickle month. It’s not fickle, though, it’s honest. It’s bitter and gentle and warm and wet and windy and freezing. There are snowbirds and robins and flowers and ice storms. And on walks with two winds I don’t feel so out of place, myself.

sugaring and snowdrops

Though it's been an odd (non)winter, most New Englanders with buckets and spiles and maples are sugaring about now. The consensus is that it won't be a great year - either sap flow will be low (there isn't enough of a temperature difference, and therefore pressure difference, to encourage flow), or the sugar content will be poor. Sugar maples need a good, long, hard freeze in order to set up their loads of carbohydrates for pre-photosynthesis spring growth. So, there's a bit of wariness that goes into tapping, but we're still doing it.

We tapped six trees today; all of them big enough for just one bucket. There are a few we left alone, due to breakage from the Halloween storm. We won't have a lot of syrup, just a taste. But the sound of sap dripping into those chapeau'd buckets is invaluable. It sounds like spring and melt and thaw itself. And what's just as exciting is looking down at the leaf litter, and seeing snow drops bursting up like Bo Peep's shepherd's crook. So, the first bulbs are up. They mean a lot, those harbingers. 'To early bulbs' is from a couple of years ago, while I was up in northern Vermont...

In Winter I said in closing,

As a simple kind of balm,

(quote) It will all come up

Roses, before too long.

But here I am, here’s Spring,

And there are no roses.

They are still thorn and bud, far

Behind the maples and lilacs, even.

They are shut closed tight I am

Like the windy spaces between

Stems, without leaves.

– just not yet, and so

No there are no roses.

But here, snowdrops bending

Reverent heads, crocuses come

Brightly and, oh gratitude, daffodils.

intergenerational scratch and sniff

Every Thursday morning I make my way to the Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton, Mass, to spend a few hours with other volunteer environmental educators in the area. As one might expect, the majority of our group is made up of women, age 65 and older, though there are a few of us younger than that, and a couple of wonderful retired men. We plan for upcoming events, whether it’s a group of fifth graders coming to learn about winter adaptations, or preparing for Big Night, an event centered on vernal pools (involving salamander costumes and luminaria).

I go to help with all of these things, as well as to meet the network of educators in my area. But I’ve found that I go, now, for the unique and decidedly rare companionship of an older generation.

These volunteers are extraordinary. One is a naturalist specializing in scat, one edits physics textbooks “in her spare time” and is a walking botanical dictionary. One has been pivotal in thirty years of forestry research around the Quabbin resevoir. Every single one is kind, humble, caring, and insatiably inquisitive. Together it makes quite the educational and nourishing group. I find myself bolstered and restored, as well as dumbfounded as to how infrequently I connect with a wide range of ages – and how essential it is.

Today was winter twig identification, an opportunity after all our work was done to tackle that tricky art. I learned beech buds (huge and golden and pointed) are fusiform, or bullet-shaped. Although one woman did say they look like old hand-rolled cigars. Shagbark hickory buds are shaggy themselves, and, like ash, enormous as they contain whole compound leaves. Basswood buds look like they’ve just been to the salon, all gussied up in a shiny red, and silver maple (believe it or not) sprouts whole clusters of round, red buds that look like flowers themselves. We had a group epiphany realizing what we thought was a white ash twig was actually a Norway maple – the lack of a ‘smiling’ leaf scar gave it away. Eureka! We also realized its growth in one season – over a foot – made more sense for the invasive Norway maple than for the ailing ash.

But my favorite lesson was the black (or sweet) birch, Betula lenta. It’s a bit hard to distinguish from cherry, each alternate with noticeable lenticels (little breathing speckles) and small, reddish, pointy buds. So you have to scratch and sniff. Here we are, a group of daughters and grandmothers, with our noses to twigs. If you sense something like rotten almonds, that’s cherry. Wintergreen, ah! Black birch. Yellow (B. allegheniensis) will do the same, but its golden bark gives it easily away.

Every week I feel a sense of relief, a righting of the order of things. Life is for learning, and what wells of wisdom and knowledge are those who’ve come before. I wasn’t taught this, not really. Respect? Yes, of course. But not real veneration. Perhaps because most or all of our disciplines are those of discovery … what is new and young is what is trusted – in technology, medicine, even philosophy. This is not wrong, of course, but it’s not all.

I can read my field guides, but I trust even more the woman who has watched her witch hazel bud, flower, and fruit for fifty years. There is no substitute for time and loving attention, and I must learn to ask more questions, instead of demanding my own mastery, which is nowhere near ripe.

a new wind

There is a new wind tonight. She is born of mud and crack and thaw, on the heels of sunlit last snow. Usually she first whispers in March, but the sap is running now in early February and I’ve already heard someone say “snowdrops.” So, the bulbs and the buds and the wind have it.

Winter wind cracks and whips, it is more force than voice. It is hollow, sharp, and fierce. On a dark January night it catches us, snaps at us, and then leaves us staring at stark stars, everything sharpened. It does not linger in its work.

But the wind tonight was speaking, with chill enough to hone and brighten, but now with character. It is beginning to be laden, as now there are bits of the world to carry, opening. Soon galls and buds will release; the machinery is at work. The stew is stirring. It won’t be long now before skunk cabbage, those alien claws that seem to exhume themselves.

This year’s turning of seasons is dipped in unease, come too early and earned too easily. But tonight’s wind, and the moonlit river, and that first smell of grass can’t be written off. They speak too softly, are too lovely, and move us too deeply and deftly. We are grasped, gladly lured into another brimming turn.

there is nothing like it

There is nothing like a crow flying

Against a pale blue dawn sky,

That blueyellowwhite canvas –

Inky feathered brushes combing its distinction.

And there is nothing like the morning crescent moon

Low, forty-five degrees above the tip

Of a cedar, exquisite composition.

The asymmetry! I say, but it’s the

Astonishing lack, without design

Or beyond it, that makes it heartwrenching

And perfect.

Like these bits of myself and eras,

The caverns and peaks.

All this perhapsandstartling

Beauty,

as it is.

the morning river

Heading east in the early morning, winding along the Deerfield, everything is golden. The trees are encased in ice, crystalline, drops of diamonds arch elegantly over the water. There is a stretch of the river that is true flood plain, the river diverges and there is an island of marsh grass, it too coated and sparkling. And the river holds on to heat, the freezing morning air condenses the moisture and the whole, wide river is steaming. Each rising molecule catches sun.

And what comes to mind is easy brilliance. Simple ebullience. Something better than anything that took just about nothing. Like all colors, it is the changing conditions of atmosphere and light that make the content, the substance seem unbelievably altered. The temperature rises as the sun’s angle widens, and everything is altered again … greater contrast, less sparkle, more depth. A different picture.

These ticking mechanisms, day length and earth tilt and the trees each with a clock in its heartwood are a chorus. A kaleidoscope that stays still but flashes change moment to moment. If I am moving too it is a clacking cliché, but when I stand still after a climb in winter early in the day or towards the end of twilight I am struck. Especially if I can feel my heartbeat in my feet or stomach or wrists, that other precarious mechanism, I understand that absolutely nothing is ever the same. It is different two inches to the right, or left, and I feel glee and desperation when I think of all the scenes that go unseen, un-gulped, un-awed. There are perfect frames of composition and light that are struck like a gong, boldly, which are left to fade and darken as quickly as they appeared. Like it was no-thing.

And that itself is a pretty enough sound-picture, I think. Imagine hillsides and valleys and plains all ringing out, as the light hits them just exactly so. A chiming, shining world. Especially in winter.

on the urgency of climate change

The juncos are significantly rounder this morning, their white underparts puffed out, looking like tiny snowmen wearing a jacket and tails. It’s cold, finally – the weather that affords us New Englanders bragging rights. None of this forties business, yesterday it was one degree at nine o’clock. But the ice and snow doesn’t bring the resounding relief I’ve been wishing for. There’s still the eerie undertone, the understanding that the patterns we’ve attuned ourselves to, the old rhymes and country lore are fast becoming obsolete.

On one of the coldest days this year I went to a lecture on climate change given by the Nature Conservancy’s Climate Change Adaptation Leader for the Berkshire region. He was reporting on the organization’s prognosis after the Durban conference, which, not surprisingly, is dreary. Not the technology, not the possibility – we have astounding technology and resources to both arrest climate change and adapt to the effects already in place (like increased moisture due to warmer seas, resulting in more extreme storm events like Irene and the Halloween snowstorm). What’s dreary is the business of it all.

The good news out of Durban was that all involved agreed we need to address climate change, and significantly reduce carbon emissions. Hooray! A start. However, the amount by which emissions are to be reduced shall be decided by 2015, and not implemented until 2020. The greenhouse effect is not linear, it is a phenomenon of positive feedback. The longer we wait the more drastic our actions will have to be, and the greater the resistance there will be to implementing them. Blast.

Driving home, Aric, who works educating about sustainability and behavioral change in consumption and waste, wondered out loud, “we who work for the environment are just another one percent – how do we convince people to care? Everyone is trying to convince everyone else of the significance of their cause – whether it’s a product, an activity, a charity, a livelihood…” It’s a good question. And in the question lies the problem – “the environment” is not a cause.

It’s not another discipline. “Environmental Studies” is a worthy course of study, but its title is misleading. The phrase, “getting back to Nature” makes me seethe. We were never out of it. The fact that we think we are, at times, to me seems quite literally insane, as completely out of touch with reality. We can be more attuned to our surroundings, but we are never out of them. It may be a statement of the obvious to say we depend upon a healthy and generous environment, but for the most part we live as if we don’t.

We are porous, with ill-defined borders that embed our surrounding ecology within us, from food to breath. A constantly shifting and sifting system, that is not romance but fact. We have a hundred unseen systems within systems, as does every organism.

‘The environment’ is the canvas upon which every single action and breath is painted. From buying shoes to brushing my teeth, calling my mother, getting an oil change, breathing and dying. It is not a cause, it is the fundament of all causes. Many ills need to be addressed, not prioritized but addressed from all levels by all manner of people. But no one “doesn’t have time” for the environment; you are the environment.

Truly, truly, when we work to save and secure the environment we rely upon, we work to save and secure ourselves. The planet itself doesn’t care, it was still Earth when mostly sulfur and volcano and heat. Covered in ice is as “natural” as a verdant Eden. And all will fall away, eventually. Perhaps that is a reality we all need to contemplate. And no great work is ever sustained by guilt and fear, only by loving optimism and conviction.

But first we all must understand the urgency.

A few resources:

http://change.nature.org

http://www.ipcc.ch/

http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/

The Deerfield in Winter

I went down to the Deerfield the other day, one of the coldest of the season. The hemlocks were frosted, drooping over the river, fishing the mist. Amidst the relative quiet of winter it is startling, always, to walk beside a river. It never ceases, year round, to rush and roar. I rather felt like knitting my eyebrows and tsking it, asking it if it had any concern at all for the turtles and muskrats deep in its banks and beds. But its thrilling rush won’t be stopped, and its inhabitants are happy for the oxygen.

In the pinkish cold the water takes on a green, a jade, eery and evocative. Its boulders throw up sprays of froth, reminding me of the prints of Mount Fuji. The river seemed to hold fury of a sort, but alongside its banks the rocks were wearing petticoats.

They had ice tiers, three layers each, all exactly level, reflecting a gray-blue sky. Their bodies seemed languid, a herd of half-dressed sea lions sprawled in their preparation. Jewels were scattered about, pebbles frosted with spray. The Deerfield is dammed, and the levels rise systematically, allowing perfectly measured rings of ice to form along its banks. In one area full sheets of layered glass had formed, three or so inches between each layer, enough for a careful hand. I wonder if the operator knew such delicate, exacting work had occurred. It was inadvertent Andy Goldsworthy.

I knelt to get my eyes level, and with my hands squeezed in my pockets I could feel the bones of hips bend. I wanted to crawl in. As I looked up and down the bank, I notice my surroundings have greened, and seem relatively lush. A distinctly different light, here – not the stark pallet of needled ground and gray-brown bark, but something full and round. And here there is not the destruction, or not as much, from the hurricane. No trees upturned, gathering rubbish and debris. And then I realized, mountain laurel!

Somewhere between bonsai and wild grape, or like hophornbeam wrung, thinned, and twisted. It seems hearty, but also sculpted and delicate. Its flowers are a cluster of cup-crowns, and its leaves waxy and evergreen. In my mind it’s our most notable member of ericaceae, the broad-leaf evergreens. They are plentiful out west, salal and Oregon grapes and kinnickinnick carpeting the coniferous floor – there is even the great twisting tree, the madrone, who belongs to ericaceae. But here it’s the mountain laurel, and until I saw its effect along the bank I hadn’t appreciated its resilience.

The flood waters of hurricane Irene ripped through roads and toppled enormous sycamores, tore out street lamps and miles of bank. And surely there were other factors that lessened its effect along this stretch of bank, but one had to be the laurels. Their leaves still clung tenaciously, undisturbed, though they had gathered masses of sticks and leaves and sand, still pointing downstream as if in mid-flow. I crawled up under one and felt I was in some eagle’s aerie. They must have lessened the water’s velocity immensely, and their slim trunks and roots must have held fast. This is quite unlike areas populated by the invasive Japanese knotweed – those banks are ripped and eroded.

So I’m bolstered by laurels, as is a lucky stretch of the Deerfield. In winter they give warmth, cover, contrast, and in the spring they’ll be awash with pink and white. While the river roars.

waiting to understand

This day breaks cold and clear, the sky a pale golden pink. The juncos are here with the flurries, though it’s hard to tell who chases which. The wind makes the feeder on the sugar maple outside my window sway, and I find myself wondering if a grouse has just landed for a snack. The jays sing their short, tremolo song – a raspy bell. There seems an air of both urgency and patience outdoors, a chill rush with the acceptance of a long wait. And I am thinking about singularity and knowing.

We identify. Isn’t that the rush? That’s Sam Peabody, like I wrote before. The confirming label that seems to acknowledge both the thing pointed at and the one whose finger is doing the pointing. ‘There you are, so here I am,’ and the like. Quite together. This is knowledge, perhaps, but it’s quite short of understanding. Most authorities on birding beg the novice to put the guide book down, as long as you’re actually looking at or listening to a bird. When you see a flash of yellow, a blotch of black at its head – keep looking. Suppress, for a moment, the urge to call it “Yellowthroat” or “Goldfinch.” Let it be one bird, itself, living, just right now. As soon as your mind plays back recording after recording in the wild attempt to remember the one who sings a chiming waterfall, you’ve stopped listening. You’ve made it “A Veery” instead of “this singular small thing, who is right now in a tree above me in these woods on this afternoon and it smells like mud and my what a lovely voice you have, what are you saying?”

When we identify, we begin to know, perhaps. I am the first to rush to claim what I have seen or heard. And no wonder, it’s been our cultural inheritance since Adam. But it is an impoverished knowledge without understanding. How do we understand a bird, a tree? We stand under them, a gesture of humble waiting. We set ourselves aside, and look. We let the individual speak, or sway, or grow. And then we can go back in and say “I have been with,” instead of merely, “I have identified.”