Root Cap

Cover Crop

Each autumn I "drill" seed.  Drill is an unkind word, but it is the word of choice among the agricoles of our time. Agricole has long been free of fashion.  I know of it only because I "read" the dictionary. That's right, I spend evenings rooting through "E" or "B" or "XYZ".  In fact often when I turn to a dictionary to confirm the stake & survey of a word (that is, is it proper?) I find myself plunging beyond the well fenced field to wander the wilds of a vast, luxuriant wordscape expectant of novel visitation.

The coherence of a dictionary is like benthic geology or the look-back time of astronomy--it can reveal through preservation of the Fuse, the strife & intentions, the thriving & frustrations of growth & ruin. A certain permanence sifting with the influence of both the dead & the living.

So it is with seed. The stuff of past efforts are its soil, and the urge of creation stirred by the earth's drift through the sun's insistence to instruct by forebear to individual, its Code. For the dead, they teem the elements of the spontaneous, such as liberty, ecstasy, radiance, excessive beauty, or those other parings of extreme energies that drive generation. Their labors give fury to the immense organs of increase that conceive & make thrive, this agricole's Rind.

S o let us make like a seed. Unbutton the coat and open the integuments of ovule. Let turn the innocent radicle to root in the dissolved pleasures of our ancestors. Take aim & create.
And Love be a force of the fruitful.

The Obligation of Energy

This coyote bush is in a mood of ungovernable increase. Its issue of seed is in such excess that ecstasy trumps ancestral renewal & the imperatives of coyote progeny.  The ground beneath this teeming pregnancy is covered in a snow of seeds! It makes no sense, this blistery release of so many offspring. There should be an everlasting winter of coyote drift covering a continent were each fertile chute married to the groaning earth.

This is primital beauty. A wild abandon that exceeds all notions of liberty. Its incomprehensible fecundity approaches the purity of mathematical freedom. A spontaneity so ill-constrained by the exhortations of a universe that thrives by law that one can almost abhor it-- anticipate a monstrous violation to be answered by a violent fall. But no judgment will undo this extreme license that pleasures us with the selfsame mysteries conceived and wombed in the spark that once ignited fires that now people the night sky.

 

Star(t)lings

Sturnus vulgaris
Their path is arduous as it is dangerous as it is desperate. Birds of prey make it a frenzied path. Sifting ocean currents bedevil it with wind & rain. Perhaps for the many, the increase of spring stir in the great distances that  separate cold from heat, dark from light. Its issue, a promise that may impassion an avian brain. The many, beset by these fevers, pad on. Those left of little desire, gather & die.

There is a place at the end of our ranch, near the roadway where they litter the ground. It is the same year after year: from late October to early December, and only here, upon this one entirely inconspicuous piece of earth,  their paths end. All ecstasies of flight. All the pleasures of the worm.

Cursed they may be by conservationist, by ornithologist and almost universally, by stern farmer, yet are not we the most noxious, invasive of all the clamorous din?  Look at what we have brought to waste & ruin on this great, Green Rind! Indeed, our ire and disgusts for these weeds of the air should haunt us. Trouble our dreams & philosophies.

 

Then Pause

The starlings are gathering now in monumental flocks that can darken the sky. Sometimes their storms of flight look like the crown of a great tree shaking in the wind. They "matter" their migration in a fierce way: sheer numbers confound and even frighten the young falcons that hold back as the black force threatens like a wildfire driven down a wind-crazed canyon. Other animals (like myself & my dogs) stand beneath the magnificent, medusa form,  mouths open and in utter silence.

To Pad

There are all different kinds of paths animals make. Now in middle November, along my path,  lay numerous, small, chalky-white "scat".
Scat, the scattering of digested matter (mostly animal) left by (mostly) migrating shore birds. This is a spotted path, padded again many tens of miles to the south (its interval, entirely of air, though a certain permanence of "signs" below will strike the narrow way).   Even Life seemingly fixed like a tree, (a "scat" of leaves) makes many paths we either forget are there, see past or will never see no matter how we try (think of of your neighborhood shade tree & imagine its entire root system laid bare! and of its fungal symbiont? impossible!).   Indeed, a path by its being thus must exclude much of what a path seeks to be. How is this so? Because a Path is like knowledge: it must content itself with the well trodden while all of Reality grows & grows...