4 posts tagged “nature”

Walking on my toes down the driveway, trying to keep my heels off the wet things: wormy-looking little brownseed, translucent pods that look like insect wings, giant black ants trooping across the squares who don't notice anything; being careful makes me feel very tall. Green algae thrushes in the shady spots where the light doesn't come through the trees after it rains; between the texture of the cement is another forest, an eighth of a millimeter high. I don't want to step on anything wet, dry, or sharp. What if the wet things are alive?

And a billion little moths lifted out of the brown leaves and into the air for the first time, billowing around like a gentle cyclone, catching light on their white wings. By and by, every moth wanders off. Late in the morning, it's warm and silvery.

Sip.

Okay, giving back up books and reading stuff again.

I think I can do it this time.

Hey!!! A family of deer!

They just passed through our yard, single file. They weren't so small - long flicking tails, some size to them. We have a pile of dead branches and sawed trunks that they like to come behind. There may be flowers there that they eat, that I've not seen.

Hm.

There they are.

I'm watching a little one wander through our yard, one ginger step at a time, nose to the ground, puling at stems. His big brown brother isn't too far behind - ears perked up, he's watching the woods. They're running! Tails up, hopping gait turns into a sprint, like furry traincars picking up speed and heading away in unison. How silent they are though!

Guess something in a neighbor's yard startled them. They probably won't be back to our woods for the rest of the day. We'll see them again though.

The easiest way to find them in the morning is to watch for the shine of the sunlight on the leaves out there. Wherever there's a brown shadow, it's either a tree or a deer. Don't focus too hard, and if the shadow moves, you've found a deer.

I will miss the woods when I'm gone.

The rain that came early this morning brought a decrease in temperature. We lost 20 degrees just after dawn. The little leaves on the berry bush out the window have pursed and stiffened. Rainwater has a way of making trees look especially nude: here, a pine has black mold bruises on her bark, and a few feet away, her sister is thinner and veiled from 10 feet up to her crown in green lichen. Branches bare, a tree without her greens, without her summer vines, upholds only claws to the sky. Trees asking, and the rain coming down is a response and from the sky, grey as a newspaper, that is no answer. None of us are sure whether it's really, really okay to bloom yet. The layered golds and browns on the forest floor, like shredded sheaves of papyrus, are the unreadable history of nature, among living ruins: between the trees, bare columns themselves, lay past years of drafts of Declarations of Independence, scraps of the terms of life's uneasy Pax with her host, elegies in leaves telling of the end of every spring / summer Golden Age.

When a column falls now, in March, at this time of the season, it lies in state.

When a column falls now, of all times, it falls because it had been sick for so long. It couldn't hold out any longer. You know the trees who are unlikely to return to life - the ground around the trunk records in a halo of bark what must be life's fundamental iniquity: survival means the end of life. What survives is us, the arcane and holy interpretation of this elegy that is our human story, and more importantly, our priesthood: we owe each other the falling water and protection from the rain. After the Fall, good God gave man his habit.

As the temperature drops, we are lucky for the sacraments we have. In unlearned ages, men would read leaves, living and dead, to speak of the future of one another. We open our palms to the sky, too. As the weather warms uncertainly here, we must be grateful for the Sacraments we have - in the future, they are our past and present, and our humiliation - out of them comes such a strange promise...

Life cycles: but we have each other, blessed memories, and this one tender piety, as we, dying in life, lose bits and pieces of ourselves and others see our halos and stay perfectly silent for us.. Some season, we'll fall. It's our shared grace. It's the terms of the peace, the gilt and the saffron and the cashmere, and when it's all spilled and split and gone cold, it's our own scraps of gold on the ground.

Loving nature, I'm inclined to believe, is part the sanctification of a man, given our condition...