Adoration of the earth
And other rites of spring.
The word of the week is discombobulated. I feel like a dandelion floating on a breeze, which is to say, sucked through the sky on uncontrolled air currents, hanging on for dear life. This wasn’t the plan for 2022. I was going to be the mangrove in the river, I vowed in January. I’d let the water rush past me, through me, paying it no mind.
Instead I am discombobulated. The dandelion isn’t consulted on where the wind decides to blow.
My little walks to the restaurant where my outdoor trees live have helped. Spring means increased watering, so I’m taking a familiar route every two or three days, and at this point in the season, there’s a new leaf or flower to inspect every hour. The ginkgoes are putting out new leaves that curl like baby trumpets, tooting their way into the world. One day the marcescent oak tree on my block is holding on tight to its coat of last year’s dead leaves; the next, they’re gone without a trace, revealing the tree’s bare skeleton peppered with feathery shoots of new growth.
My neighborhood lost most of its magnolias in a late frost, but two shaded trees nestled inside church gardens have just started to bloom, filling cracks between brick buildings with clouds of pink. Had they been more exposed, they probably would have flowered with the rest of their cousins. Now their blooms are the only survivors.
It’s no wonder our ancestors treated springtime as sacred. What do you do when everything is happening all at once? How do make sense of it, keep your feelings from spiraling beyond your control? In Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, adoration of the earth is only part one. Then comes a human sacrifice.
I don’t have a person to sacrifice to the season, so I’m trying to resolve my agita another way, by observing this landscape and noting everything I can. Every flower identified is a victory. Every fragrant sniff a way of anchoring myself against the wind.
Remember that street tree planting I wrote about in December? The transplanted trees have recovered enough to send out new growth, and the decorative bulbs we planted along them have come into bloom.
“Busy busy busy,” the Bokononists say. Bokononism is the nonsense religion in Kurt Vonnegut’s end-of-the-world novel, Cat’s Cradle. It’s a call-and-response of sorts that acknowledges the unpredictable, infinitely complex machinery of the world. The made-up terms in Bokononism function like incantations; by speaking them, practitioners will them into something real.
I wonder how the trees deal with all of this, the everything-nowness of spring. Does a tree get discombobulated?
Physically stressed, yes. The rest I can’t say. Because trees don’t react to isolated events with emotion. They respond to bigger, more gradual changes in their environment. And like the Bokononists, the trees speak these changes into being. They’re written in their rings.
Tree reading
Adventures in making tea from camellias in the garden, or as Jonathan Kauffman puts it, failure is a gift. [A Place is a Gift]
Finding balance by…chopping a tree’s leaves in half. [Adam Asks Why]