GRASSES OF THE FIELD

In this still evening the air is soft-- yesterday's cold, but with a new warm edge we can feel in our animal selves as the barely rain falls. The long wild grasses now draping the mountainside, grasses that wore the color of dying leaves back in autumn, and in winter - where they edged from the snow - were dead grey, this evening have a remarkable goldenness that reaches from within, a power they have always carried, that isn't life, exactly, but isn't death either - that says in the darkling hours that life is returning, that there is no edge to being: simply wait-- new life is here, has never left.

Even in what we deem death there are things to be done in ancient, hard-learned ways; thus the grasses glow in the early rain: they have evolved, seeded, grown, seeded again for this purpose too, among the countless others, and teach us of our own purposes, in lives we might view simplistically as regrettable aging toward regrettable cessation. For us, as for the grasses and all that lives, there is function everywhere along the line of life-- before, alive and beyond. As in the grasses of the field, the line is always reaching further than we can ever know at any once; in our way through life we are immeasurable, especially within.

Nodding gold in the faintest breeze, the blades go on glowing until all is dark, for now...

A MODEST PROPOSAL

Come on, Monsanto, shine your light! There's no need to keep being voted the worst corporation in the world year after year! If GMOs are as wonderful for humanity as you've insisted dozens of times a day in courts around the world for the past 20 years or so, then stop going to court to keep the public from knowing that your patented wondergenes are already in their food and children! If GMOs are even half as great as you say, you should be fighting to label everything GMO! A GMO label should be a HUGE selling point, right Monsie? So get that love out there for everyone to share! Hey! Where'd everybody go? Why are my tomatoes glowing? What's happening to my hands?

Monsanto's Minions Attack CA's Right to Know About GMOs

Here’s my ongoing Monsanto links page, clear evidence that Monsanto is being illogically litigious and irrationally secretive...

ICICLES, EDUCATION

Kaya came over to visit the other afternoon and ran toward the house with more than her usual supernova of excitement, not because she was about to run inside to play video games, because there aren't any in there, or to do puzzles or draw pictures or write letters which she loves and can do for hours; she was overjoyed at spotting some big icicles dangling from the high eave that she couldn't reach, and then on the rim of one of the rain barrels she found a gleaming, straight, clear and thick icicle that she could get hold of and break off and lift up and look at from all angles - icicles held up high are filled with blue sky, as she demonstrated to all - then she had to find a worthy place for the shining crown jewel of the vicinity, she couldn't just throw it away or take it into the house and admire it by the woodstove, but where could she put it that would do justice to its beauty?

She searched and found the perfect spot on the front of our car, where the long diamond would fit snugly yet stand upright, pointing to the sky like an icicle should, to a child's way of thinking, like a diamondy thing from a story, and lo and behold, there stood the soul of fantasy, right on the front of our formerly just plain car, now turning into diamond. Clear and real was the magical ice, and the light it carried, so valuable and desirable, but shortlived, so all the more lookable at. When at last we went inside we could still see it from a window: a diamond full of sky, shining there in the dusk.

Almost goes without saying that Kaya is bored with school...

WIND vs. GUY

Bitter cold strong Siberian winds last night tried to blow me and my motorcycle off the road all the way up in the twisty dark, tumble me off down the mountain or into the deep dark of the forest just for a little windy fun, but I been there I'm from upstate NY, baby, used to ride my red-and-cream Columbia bicycle with the streamers on the handlegrips through the howling snow over ice and never even nearly fall, way back in the heart of those Tri-city winters, more like Antarctica vortexed to a frenzy through the Hudson Valley, of course I was only around ten then and I'm around multiten now, so there's that, but do I still have it, do I still have it yessss I did and do, I just hovered over the center of gravity like way back in time or hunkered over as needed, got in the zone and enjoyed the wind's frustration as it tried everything in its way big bag of airy tricks-- like a lull before a turn, then a brief hurricane during, then an even sharper opposite blast right while you're compensating the other way, stuff like that, this was Olympic level, but I still had enough to stay upright, the wind was all blustery at how blithely I was wheeling up through the best it could throw at this puny human, at least by normal earth rules, I mean after a hard day in an office in the city you gotta find some primal pride somewhere, and how better than to take on a winter wind in the dark on a twisty mountain road and win?

The wind had the last word in the morning, though, with the trillion tons of snow it brought from Siberia that I had to shovel as the air snickered all around me.

LISTEN RIGHT NOW

Today a fine sunny blue-skyed early Spring day up here on the mountain, me outside at last in late afternoon after wrestling to a draw with words up in the loft for the noonly hours...

Fine to be outside at last, full of ambition and tools in hand, here amidst the breath of trees beneath the calls of spiraling hawks to do some essential next year's firewood work. Just got started when I stopped at a sudden song from way up in the big oak tree, an intense and passionate riff with a special finish to it, repeated over and over with variations here and there and in the curlicue ending; it was a young early warbler, trying out a new Spring repertoire for all he was worth, adding what he felt to the old stuff.

He was bouncing around up there all alone like something of major importance was going on, as in fact it was. It clearly meant the world to him, and I got to share in that bit of joy. These early samplings of Spring swell the buds in us all, carry that ancient urgency right to our hearts from far before we ever were. His song carried all that too, made me stop my next year's work and listen right now to what's deeply going on.

SEEDS INTO THE WORLD

We had the traditional turning to Spring a few days ago, Echo doing the soybean-tossing ritual late at night; therefore we think of it as Spring already... So there I was, out in the late Spring afternoon today, thick curtains of snow in the way far north, that's yukiguni (snow country) up there, where it looks like it's still winter, but here it's perfect chill Spring weather for splitting firewood, and so I do. I have a new camphorwood splitting stump, which the landscaper down below left for me by the roadside. He left two of them. Perfect they are: sleek, heavy, fragrant, immune to decay...

The pauses are splendid too, I stop and rest the axe on the sawdusty ground, look up and see a blueing sky, the sun touching all with gold every now and then, and between me and the sky the lacework of the old chestnut tree, its limbs bare but for a few stubborn dun leaves and a last dozen or so spiky husks, now wide open as though shouting to the sky "I did it! I did it! I sent my seeds off into the world! To become big trees! I did it!" And right they are. Emptynesters know that feeling.

Working near the garden, thoughts of seeds naturally germinate into ambitions... Gonna try some tromboncino this year - heard the stems are too tough for the weevils to poke into... and some radicchio too (up here on the mountain? gotta try it!) and a zuke variety not so dependent on insect pollination, more like ad hoc immaculate conception; sounds interesting too. And some different kinds of basil in the new herb bed; more seeds waft on the mindwind...

The sky is getting bluer as I work, even as it gets colder, the split oak stacking up until the barrow is full, then it's wheeled over a ways and added to the cord-to-be, all those woody triangles a richening shade of pale gold, wooden ingots of wealth in the blue of the sky; then suddenly there are, all over the place - what must be - yes, they are: big fat flakes of snow, plopping straight down through the still air onto the split wood, the axes and me, the ground all around turning white, where in heaven did they all come from? It’s blue up there! Winter again!?

Not for the whole rest of the day, I hope.

THE ENIGMA OF THE WHEELIES

So this morning, because there was a bunch of heavy logs blocking the way I habitually take when staidly edging my motorcycle out to the conventional northside road, I had to remove the chain from the gate to the narrow bamboo-lined southside road, then for no discernible reason I what-the-hell zoomed out beneath the big oak, zipped past the garden, roary-jounced down the jaggedy bumpy stone steps, leaped the culvert at the bottom like stunt man, did a damn right! couple of rubber-burning whirly spins just for the hell of it then lay some more rubber in a long wheely nearly all the way down through the bamboo tunnel to the other road that leads back to the conventional northside road, where I was soon back in the quiet rut of the normal world's way down the mountain to the ho-hum train, looking as staid, unwheelied and nonrubber-laying as I generally do, and no one suspected, not one had a clue, excepting the crow that had been shocked by my actions at that hour of his day, and cawed from his overhead perch all the while at the what the hell I was doing, and the usually quiet dog across the way, who had never before had the chance to bark at a motorcycle bouncing down stone steps like in the movies, to say nothing of all the roaring and the superbly executed wheelies. At the office, those events were on another planet.

The days lead on, do they not. Especially the mornings...

COLD WEATHER RIFF

At last we've got some weather I can call cold, who grew up in upstate New York just south of the north pole where winter weather meant daggery January winds racing howling down from the north with icicle teeth as we teens stood thin-clad on the rimed streetcorners at night bein cool, hangin out... It just doesn't seem to get that cold any more, a situation that often prompts my fogey intro "Why when I was a boy...," begetting in turn that roll of the eyes in any teenagers or so in the vicinity "Oh no, not that story again, about the weather..."

Yeah, and unlike you kids nowadays at the age of 9 I used to go out at 5 a.m. in NY winter blizzards to deliver the morning newspaper before going off to school, and those were blizzards like you don't see anymore. One place I used to deliver the papers to in the wintry darkness was in the big old cemetery out beyond the edge of town. None of the dead subscribed, but the cemetery caretaker did, and he lived in the big old Addams family caretaker's mansion with its pointy spires and tall narrow windows, beyond the high, creaking, speartipped, slowly opening cast iron gate...

At the first squeal of the heavy gate there began to sound from the lower depths of the house an infernal howling, a devilish moaning, long and lowing, yearning for the flesh of a young paperboy trudging down the long wide deep-snow walk in the dark beneath the high arching bare-limbed, arm-waving, body-grabbing elm trees, toward the big plate-glass-windowed doors that glowed with a sinister nightlight there in the distance through the snowflake-spewing wind...

"What ghosts must live here," would always race unbidden through my 9-year-old mind surrounded by graves, the keepers of the air brushing my face with the whispering snowflakes of the dead...

That soul-chilling yowl was the eccentric caretaker's herd of Great Dane hellhounds, each twice my height on its hind legs, yearning pent up all night in the silent house until there was my sound at the gate...

As I approached the house the hounds arose from the cellar depths and began their clacking galloping yowling traversal of the long wood-floored corridor that stretched from the far back of the house to the front door, timing their journey perfectly in the dim light so that just as I reached the doorway and was about to place the newspaper on the doormat safely out of reach of the drifting snow their massive paws would strike the giant plate glass windows of the doors like bearclawed catcher's mitts and send a whang of a bonging gong shuddering thoughout the dead-air house and me and the universe, and the dogs would stand slavering overhead, booming their deep bass roar-bellows over and over through the ice-toothed morning air as I positioned the newspaper, turned and walked toward the gate and squeaked once again beyond their reach, until perhaps tomorrow, before dawn... Those were interesting times...

And that was cold, that was cold... you don't get weather like that anymore...

Or newspapers...