The green fuse

Now comes Bealtaine, following close on the heels of the snows.

Now comes the great flush of life unleashed from long months bound deep in ice: muskrat pouring through fresh-thawed waters, common loon and  trumpeter swan riding south winds to boreal lakes, the rise of the yellow warbler calling sweet, sweet, I'm so sweet. 

Mallard pair feeding side by side in the water meadow along the creek. Great Horned Owls roost in a tall willow, guarding their adolescent owlet, still tawny fuzz. Raccoon in twilight flowing up the stucco of neighbor's garage and in through the opening in the window frame, where she may be raising kits.

Everything swishing, splashing, rushing, shaking off the shackles of winter and hurrying to claim breeding territory, find food, arrange the world more to their liking.

Warm winds, changeable cloud stretched in streamers. Soft gray fur of the pussy willow. Whistle of the cardinal, the last full moon of April shedding her radiance on the mortal world like the Queen of the May.

New buds held tight, pointed green origamis bobbing tenderly in the wind. Browns of winter threaded with small green, a salad of golden caterpillar catkins, crisp willow leaves, soft moss and rolled, purple-green spears of bloodroot.

Following the travels of a pilgrim walking the Old Way to Canterbury, who ended his pilgrimage at dawn today by the edge of the sea. A stained glass journey in song, words and dreamlike images of the countryside, its sacred wells. Waymarkers, holloways, spirals of shell-fans with bone china ridges. A book of holy days, with the tale ending (or beginning?) on the great pagan fire festival as the rising tide of life is renewed, remade, released into the wild air to reanimate the earth.

I kindle no hilltop fire today but in my heart. I smell no blossom but in memory. Yet I light a candle for the holy day.

This morning's rain clouds shall pass as warmer air blows in from the south this afternoon. What I will pack for a ramble to observe this day: the lovely book I'm reading, notebook and pen for nature jottings, the last of the trail mix. And a reverence for spring, whose red-winged blackbirds float over waterlands, calls ringing through the cattails as they claim each moment of this fast-slipping life for their own.

The Earth Bible

I was watching a PBS series on high-achieving women. One of them, who pilots jets, said she can't understand people who don't believe in God, because just look at the magnificence of His Creation.

That is totally circular thinking, but it made me wonder: Why don't people see the earth itself as a creator instead of a creation?

The earth is sacred and divine because it is a manifestation of life, a macrocosm of the universe, ever unfolding, branching, collapsing, rebirthing, reforming in a billion shapes and expressions, so wondrous, so natural.

When is natural supernatural? Perhaps when a human can't fathom or explain it. That we think of the earth as natural does not dismiss or take away its mystery, it allows us to recognize its true wondrousness and that it created and unfolded itself. 

If we allow the earth its own divinity, apart from human thought and beliefs, then we are granting it personhood, independent of any belief in god or religion. If we think of every animal, tree, mountain as a person, then surely it follows that the earth has personhood, too.

What is earthly is divine. That means, all earthly life is divine. We are divine, the animal and green persons are divine also. We are all immortal in that our death supports new life. We are all resurrected into the earth, the waters, into the plants, into the insects and birds. That is my take on reincarnation. We don't stop being part of everything when we die.

What are the common beliefs I may share with this woman? A sense of original instructions, of ethical guidelines, of helping not harming. Only her instructions are from the bible and mine are natural law. Why, I wonder, does the bible bear little similarity to the original instructions of Native peoples? It seems unpeopled by our wild relatives, the earth and its endless bounty, except through the single channel of God.

Where in it is our direct relationship to the Earth itself, the true source of all that is life-giving? What would the Earth Bible look like?

On this Earth Day, I'm thinking the Earth Bible is part user manual, part love letter, part wonder tale. It has one real commandment: That which sustains life, and the sustainability of life, is good. That which does not is bad. That's the morality of The Earth Bible.

If humans abandoned belief systems (whatever form they take) that have taken us so far astray—beliefs that allow them to continue destroying every creature up to and including humanity—then maybe they could once again follow the teachings of The Book of Earth. And we would halt our unbounded hubris and foolishness, and rather honor and tend to the health of our home every day.  So mote it be, for all of us who love this earth with all our being, and those of us who have lost their way.

The winter of our discontent

Not much to say except that I wish I could curl up small like a cat into my armchair and dream away the snowy hours until spring.

(Cats are eminently sensible beings, knowing what cannot be mended must be endured. Naps? A way of life.)

For it still snows, still it snows—such a long, grey dream of winter it seems timeless, mythic.

Not a winter but The Winter, whom the migrating birds battle for survival while we look on, numbed, through our dreary windows.

I feel like a child in the back seat of the car during a long drive (five months, heading into six) asking, when will we be there? We passed the signpost for spring weeks ago without seeming to arrive.

As flakes fall, the crows tear past the windows on their crow missions. Unlike some, they waste no time moping.

I am not sleepy, though very dull. I shall make a bowl of popcorn and crawl under a cozy blanket.

A proper if not very imaginative response to realities such as snow in April.

Addendum:

Then this morning, this fairy frosting as the sun took mercy and showed his shining face:

Goodbye, beautiful borealis, I believe your day is done for now.