March 31, 2008
rights of spring
It exists in Slow Time, that place where there are no deadlines, no telephones vibrate, and there is no season of new television comedy. It is spring. Coming at its own pace. Once in twelve, or thirteen, moons or so. Nothing is definite. No weather, no memory, no seed reliably germinate. Rain, sun, wind, planetary spinning. Spiders appear, and the migrant birds. Today I saw a swallowtail swerve and cling to flowerless stem. Hopeful, perhaps. That is the metaphor. Hope. Spring. We poor species, us humans. We are the annuals; we live once and die. The delightful, impatient, and fragile froth of the garden, bred for show, aimed at brilliance, collapsing after the season concludes. But so beautiful and entrancing. Our genes crafted for maximum effect in a brief performance. In my garden I have given them the center for attention.
The gift of spring is subtle, no matter how showy the effect. It is perennial. Except if, as Rachel Carson feared, it was silenced, or ceased. But then nothing and nobody would be left to care. And that is the secret charm of our peculiar species - we care about these things. These quiet and noisy acts of nature. We think them acts anyway. They are, I think, less acts - like magic - than knowings. Plants know spring like humans know love.
As the garden comes awake I too must leave the slumberland of wintery retreat and lumber from my slow dark cave. The towhees and chickadees, the solitary wren have all come out to inspect the new year and so do I. It lives. I live. The wisteria must be lavender and bloom again.
