Commentary

In the course of my almanack record keeping, I have found that soil temperatures generally follow the normal average air temperatures within maybe ten degrees. But in the spring, the ground often lags behind the weather, remaining cold, and causing considerable anguish to the farmer and gardener.

For example, if your beans go in before the earth is warm enough, they rot where you lay them. “Nothing sprouts,” says the ancient Greek sage, Theophrastus, “before its proper time.” At least I think he said something like that…..

Cross-Quarter Day is April 21, a day before Earth Day this year, the day on which the sun reaches halfway between equinox and solstice, and enters the late spring sign of Taurus. Now the meager inventories of change that characterized equinox quickly fill with new details each day. The floral and faunal fragments of the season multiply, literally filling in the space of Earth with tangible, visible clockwork.

The older I become, the more I am aware of the sources of my moods, the more I see the almost deciduous nature of my emotions, the clear and critical relationship between the outside world, the passage of the seasons, and my mind.

I've found that my self is somehow loose, unanchored, and that it continually needs an abundance of landmarks and time tellers, needs colors, and aromas, and textures over and over in order to find meaning, orientation, and place.

“I believe,” wrote the poet Robinson Jeffers,  “that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole….”

Under the spell of middle spring, it is not so difficult to feel part of that one being, to sense that we express its energy and hope. Because this  is the week of pale violets in the lawn and vast patches of dandelions along the roadsides.

Recent events have unnerved me and pulled me just a little out of my lazy spring fever. It seems very clear that the global environment will be challenged more than ever during the years ahead.

Well, I attempt to begin to respond: I return to Gary Snyder’s poem, “For the Children", and his admonition to stay together, to learn the flowers and to go light.

So I have learned a lot of flowers in the past decades of my life. I start there. I see that floral taxonomy is not so much a matter of botany as it is a result of noticing, of watching, of caring.