Good afternoon. How is your weather today? Here it seems to be enduring something of a timing crisis, not identity, as it appears to know what season it is according to sun angle, leaf emergence, perennials emergence, and ephemerals emergence; but identity, in that even as myriad shades of green, and multiple hues ranging from one end of the color spectrum to the other are shoving past the protective tans, browns, beiges of leaf cover, there is no agreement on the appropriate air temperature for the date/sun angle/plant emergence. This morning when I awoke and looked out, winter frost covered all things natural and mechanical. And now, while the frost is gone, I shiver while wearing four layers–two of them wool; and, don, prior to venturing outside, a third wool layer and “outside” scarf wrapped around the jacket collar, which covers my “inside” scarf and turtlenecks, etc. etc. Two days ago, maybe even part of yesterday, spring was springing. A few days before that, could have been summer based on temperature, and the number of windows I had opened in my house. Today, windows closed tight. Heat on.
Heat. Now, that at this time is a freighted word. And in several of its definitions/uses it is up and down day to day–natural temperature heat, produced temperature heat, market heat, human temper heat, competition-duration heat, bully-held and bully-resented heat, righteous heat…–the state of heat is unsteady, some might say, or all might say at least some of the time, unbearably so, uncontrollably so.
So I am finding myself staring at, staring at I don’t know what, whatever is wherever I am at a particular time, sometimes seeing it, and, in fact, seeing it more deeply, more attentively than I might most any other time. I also find myself, staring at nothing, sometimes to the tune of some song or wordless music playing–a single stanza only, on repeat–within my ears, behind my eyes, occasionally plucking the strings of vocality behind my throat. And I take a lot of aimless–sometimes short, sometimes miles long–walks, or now, since first hot spring heat day, bicycle rides. And I read. I read diversionary literature and instructional literature. But I swallow very little. All read would be well served to be reread if I want to take anything away from it. Because staring, maybe even blank staring, is the prevalent looking, watching, seeing mode I am engaged in.
I have not accumulated a fistful of photographs from among which to share with you. I have not identified an earful of rerising, and passing-through bird songs to report. Well, a most prominent white throated sparrow seems to have audibly supplanted the mockingbird this week. I have seen a carolina wren, but this one seems to not want to rule, and silently clutches a branch swaying as it hangs from high in the weeping birch out front. And the robins are very present this year.
I thank God for the creational beauty that can be turned to even within the cracks between concrete pavements, within the fissures in aging asphalt, edging through the miniscule separations of asphalt walk, concrete walk, and granite curb, as well as the planned, the sprawling, the untended and tended home green spaces, as well as the woodlands–be they feet by feet square or acres wide and long abutting utility corridors, highways, city and town and village edges, cemeteries, rail corridors, rivers and ponds, encasing water treatment facilities, created wetlands, low rise apartment communities, human-dug gravel pits, rock quarries, waste and recycling repositories.
What a lot of trash we leave in our wake. What a lot of beauty we are offered.
While you’re at it, maybe read TS Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland in which resided the line partially quoted in the title of this piece. Get up and sing, or walk, or run after you read it, because you will need to be lifted up. It speaks of us, and is true to its title. Here is how it starts:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Or from Robert Frost, from Two Tramps in Mud Time, a little less dire in tone but also speaks volumes, I think, as I read it, about a human condition–valuing self, importancing self over others:
“The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud come over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.”
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