SPRUNG THOUGHTS

Out there today doing various odd jobs amidst the melting snow piles, Siberia still wailing just the other side of the mountains, I noticed that the jinchoge knows something, its bud tips barely beginning to well with hints of the color that blossoms with the fragrance of joy that is always a stunning surprise one morning in the dun of early Spring. Daphne. Sweet daphne. And each Spring when I dredge up the English name it gets me thinking about how when I was a kid there were so many autumnal women, aunts and grandmas, named Daphne or Myrtle, unlike today,when women named Myrtle are rare.

At the age of 7 or 8 I didn’t know that Daphne and Myrtle were the names of special flowers that everyone loved, so it always puzzled me why so many stately looking women had these odd and funny sounding names, so like daffy and turtle; then by the time I was twice as old, around 13, I'd learned that these were the names of beautiful fragrant plants that everyone loved and I was even more puzzled as to why these regal and rather hefty ladies were so named. It didn't deeply occur to me that they had once been my age, even younger. The first hints of Spring beget sprung thoughts from a past as long as mine.

So too the oddness of seasonal edges must have affected the panicky hiyodori (brown-eared bulbul), because as I went strolling past the garden, mulling thoughts like the above on my way to add some kitchen garbage and wood ashes to the compost pile, I heard a panicky wing beat, turned and saw that a bulbul had found a way into the netted portion of my garden (Winter is empty and Spring isn't here yet, so the big cupboard is empty except for my little cache), where he’d been enjoying a solitary repast of fresh greens until I'd come blundering along. When he saw me he leaped for safety, but straight up and into the net, there flapping like a moth at the sunlight, but unlike his usual panicky bulbul behavior he wasn't screeching all the while.

I began to think I'd have to go in there to free him and he would totally flip, maybe even die of panic, being among the more psychotic of birds. But  finally he fell back, tumbled into his secret entry hole and exited, flew up into the oak and sat here on a high branch screeching bulbulese insults at me for being such an idiot, for behaving so rudely in his presence, for coming upon him completely unannounced like that while he'd been enjoying a well-deserved banquet, this was his kingdom after all, and when he saw me  just stand there, obtusely insisting on my rights, he winged huffily away, grumbling across the air.

You know those used-up CDs that farmers hereabouts hang in their gardens to let twirl in the wind, gleaming and blinking in the sunlight like big owly or hawky eyes to scare marauding birds away, well they don’t work. There were two such CDs hanging just above the briganding bulbul, who seemed to enjoy their helpful light, perhaps he thought he was in some kind of fancy wingless-two-legger dining and dancing establishment with funky walls, had gotten in without a ticket and was enjoying the free food, the kind that tastes best. I’m not happy being a bouncer, but sometimes a guy’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. The nasty language comes with the job.

Soon my thoughts turned again to the sweet old names Daphne and Myrtle... Since leaving home, I don’t think I’ve ever met another lady of either name. Geez, I have to debark some of this oak... Wonder why no men are named Oak...

JINCHOGE...

...the first notes of fragrance on those tiny lavender trumpets...

FLOWER POWER

It's amazing what one can do in just a couple of hours. This afternoon I went out to work in the garden for two hours and during that time planted several varieties of flowers, two rows of radishes, one of lettuce, one of spinach and one of rocket, pruned the kinmokusei, stacked the firewood and sharpened a wedge, the list of things to do reaching from me to Tierra del Fuego, but at least I made a start. That was just a couple of hours in the afternoon.

And all the while I was delighting in the perfume wafting from the jinchoge, up in the cloud of consciousness wondering why it is that we humans love those fragrances so much. I'm human, I'm curious (two qualities not necessarily mutually defining); I know that evolutionarily it is good for the flowers: smell great, get propagated. But what is the evolutionary advantage in it for us humans? How does love of those fragrances enhance our survival? What advantage is it to pause in the grove of cherry blossoms and listen to the warbler sing, thereby sampling paradise, though it appears to offer no survival benefit? Indeed just the opposite, as implied in the danger-imminent cherry blossom scene in The Seven Samurai, one of the greatest scenes ever put on film, in the greatest movie ever made.

It must be that the fragrances of flowers touch memories far beyond our own, reach ancient and essential depths in us that would otherwise go unmet in the onrush of our lives, and that from flowers we learn how to be deeper in both person and spirit as we live and grow the tree of humanity. Clearly, there are those in positions of power who have never gotten a single thing from flowers; but judging by the beauty of these fragrances, so intimate with the winds of Spring and the spirit of change, flowers will never give up trying.