Root Cap

In Memory Of

There is not much effort in the passing of one year to the next. I go to bed in 2005 and wake in the natal year 2006.  If it were not for the convenience of numbers, maybe we would reckon the sealing-off like a tree---go dormant, and when one quickens again to the good work of creating---well there's a ring formed from prior strife to stiffen the new to any adversity.

Believe me, if there is to be a riot of green, of shoot-worthy growth, of nest building & lustful song above; than below, in the fragrant shade, in the wit & potency of humus, in the incantations of life-endowed dirt---there must be death. Think of it as what we leave ungirded in the annuli of our lives---it becomes the annealing fuse for a new ring as winter gives way, as the Sun strengthens, the Earth warms, and the birds return.

But all the forces at work to bring about a year's harvest of death, cease not.

Like a tree bend honestly against ocean wind; take a virtuous hold of firm earth & resist ruin of the north---but should the will for good work attenuate, the animation of beauty abrade & the desire for adventure drain from every cell, leave us the new year with this certainty: at the center of your death is a Love sealed-off from the destruction that has given birth to it. This Love is what trees dream of in their winter sleep. The sleep that completes the old ring, which begins the power  invoked by a new, great awakening.

This Love is the force of the fruitful---& to be fruitful, is, after all, the Aim of every new year.

 

Waste

Only rot washed from the earth & swept out to sea, or ash of incinerated carcass fed to the watery deep; not even corruption held aloft by a silvery snag, or ruin of carrion bellied away by creatures decay will one day visit---but all terrestrial pollution & spoil advance their aim through reception of our living soils---soil being the soul of gravity's good husbandry & most propitious host to these fallen dead.

Aside this contamination of death---temperature (the excitation of wave-particle fundament), chemistry (hard won alliances that in litter persist or perish) & water (our earliest form of ravishment) are each a principle limiting factor for the number & diversity of soil flora & fauna, constituents of which, here at the farm range from oaks & grasses, ground squirrels & pocket gophers, to beetles, earthworms & mites, to springtails, nematodes, actinomycetes, to the fine, filamentous fungi, to at last & hardly least, both material & efficient cause of all our thriving---numinous,teeming, progenitorial bacteria---as if death commences a recapitulation of the biblical narrative "In the Beginning...", with the Rushing Spirit animated anew in the conceptus of our humus.

And so it is, one struggles to find anything death-like in rotting litter. It churns & heaves with wondrous generation.

Within a mere gram of robust topsoil the life of ruin penetrates:  100,000 fungal hyphae forming three dimensional weaves; 1,000,000 actinomycetes with their own divaricate filaments; & the natural wisdom of excess: more than 100,000,000 bacteria in abundance----& all these but the subjects of two kingdoms! (In your mind's eye add a scurrying beetle; look closely & see a fragment of coyote scat; imagine a probing, speculating root hair; perhaps a few ants, a mollusc, a bird peck & draw-down of an annelid, all delighted to advance the great creative asunder & aspiration of death.)

Place "dead matter" upon this porous membrane and it potently sinks into a genesis that compenetrates & quickens. Powers of entity abrade into novel flows of mass & energy----and, as we now know, they churn & heave.

Gulliver-like, lie flat upon vigorous ground---not upon such abused earth as that horror of nature: chemically sterilized suburban lawns of the wicked  & the ignorant---but upon something like the fragrant decay of last spring's mowing & remain entirely still. Dampen the strokes of breath. Allow them to sink inward until they are astride the heart. Ease the heart down toward its river of sleep.  Wait for tissues, organs & fluids to seep groundward. Drain thought to the outer extremities. And wait.

Waste.

Soon a dozen ants are inquiring. Several spiders stir. A lizard spys out from a grassy distance & edges shadow-ward. Mites drift down by the thousands. Flys sniff out the air above. Spores tumble into the tiny cracks & creases of skin. In a distance tree a red tail's eyes are upon the supine, odorous beast. A raven drops from a utility line & hops toward your feet. A beetle races across your breast. Night crawlers uncoil & wake vast numbers of rotifers that riot  the watery voids left by the ploughing worm. Beneath the body, the ground trembles & stirs. Numerous living things are now keen to your presence. Graveness cogitates. Their interests, their desires roil the damp, gaseous loam. Whether or not they have taken hold, you can almost feel your trunk rock in a cradle of earth; the self gently tugged and dragged down into the dirt.

I sometimes wonder if the inert weatherings of shadowy mounts that swell the valley floor with mica, feldspar & quartz are not just of mineralized terra firma, but of a vivid matter---an entirely heretical notion---that such constraints as heat & moving fluids & elemental bonds conceal even as they confirm the livingness of atomic preponderance, of radiant fields, & of gravitational allurement---the many into the one advancing life such that death be just more evidence of endless, immensely pleasurable, at great liberty, entirely open, wild with speculation, stewed in sexual union, ever resourceful in damnation, at peace with all adversity, universal creation.

 

 

Winter Rain

The world wheels & wastes our days. One year carries corruption into the next.  The trunk grows bent & tired; the cricket stiffens; heart congested, a fallen bear slaps at the starry deep; the cankered oak creaks beneath a leafless crown; and one day our very Sun shall belch & fume & distend with ill humour.

The Arrow of Time.

The Arrow of Time is a trope of the temporal asymmetry of a closed system, that once begun in a state of low entropy*, evolves, and by Spontaneity, condemns the common interest to a relentless & irreversible eroding of purpose.  High entropy is the enfeebling of all memory & ancestral instruction. Perfect entropy is the stillness that descend upon a devastation that shrouds the ruin of God (but only if that God was fruitful---was a God of love & issue).

It must be said that Spontaneity never compels abundant entropy to cohere the rotting carcass, or raise the dead from their graves.

Such time-asymmetric systems seem to include our universe, for as legend goes we began with a hot flush of mattered birth expelled from a yet-to-be explained womb of stellar fertility. Mass & energy quickly gathered into an alliance of dark matters & ignited galaxies.

As these aboriginal universes cohered into the distinct tribes we recognize as Spiral, Elliptical & the Misshapen, they are, we have learned, refugees from an earlier, more communicative confederacy. It now appears  each is being whipped & driven away from its native ground--- harried along in an ever-expanding, ever-darkening, empty universe. The curse that clings to each as they slouch toward a vast waste of endless space & black exile? The Arrow of Time.

But wait, Life is a thermodynamically open system! Though adherents live & die, the adhering flourishes (forever?)! Influence is like the air we lung. All of our antecedent universe instructs, cajoles, preaches, inspires & speculates. It loves this wilderness of breeding---of birds dancing in leaves; of the great heron in the rush, its lover in the reeds; of the flower & the feeding bee; of the symbiont lichen to the symbiont tree clinging; of the fungal spores' blessed ubiquity!

God is fruitful, the fuse of permanence in this ceaseless issuing. The presupposition to every vivid presence. The rot & corruption that confirms its passing. The waste that wields future worlds. The beauty that inspires the genius of cell resourcefulness.  Of every type of cellular thriving that has, in a provocative solidarity, brane this planet.

God is of the dead that inform our way. 

Of Spontaneity & the Arrow of Time  conspiring to purge old endeavors for new engenderings.

Surely the imperatives of the Second Law do not reason a weariness of Life to infect & disease? 

Perhaps there is an unexplained aim to entropy; an insight that may reveal disorder to be like fluvial erosion. A mode of  ablative nourishment.  A flow engorged with seed-potential---to pioneer new primordia, to germinate upon new lands born from (yet-to-be-explained) womb-like seas of stellar fertility?

*entropy is a measure of "disorder": the higher the entropy, the greater the disorder. The above is an assertion of all license. For a more "formal" treatment see Penrose

Scientia

In Silurian night, some four hundred & forty or so million years hence our troubling dominion, plant & fungi, thread to root as hand-in-hand, came by dark to a barren place. A blasted land, desolate of all organic conjuring but for oceanic Monera (three billion years the fluency & spring of cellular fountaining). They, anointed with instruction, understanding & aim (thrice accounting of the Great Permanence) tenuously dipped into an unwelcoming ground of elemental discord which, as proper symbionts, in time turned to a nourishing soil. Our planet became green and nothing was ever the same.

Today, conoybe tenera (?) and others of this ilk, rise out from a rich humic world, where below the hyphea conjoin, copulate and send their pregnancies to the extreme of mycelial netherness, stooling into a mammal's terrestrial heaven. Virtually all of plant life betroth fungi in a Love that could teach us what we have yet to learn.  Regard Mycorrhizae.

This love one day may come, for within this uncertain, shifting, (transitory?) ascendancy of H. sapien, we of the human nursery are granted generous access into the wonder of things. Science and its ability to attenuate the excess of Love's fellowship , manages its insights through the innocent yet fertile dialectic of speculation & experiment. Repeatability serves as an organic truth-- a truth that is mortal; that is born, comes to youth with an envious reputation; flourishes even as it ages, than passes into neglect, its withered fruit left hanging, its trunk blacken.

Novel imagination, acute physical intuition & the guiding light of mathematics (permutation of ritual instruction!) have driven the cultivation of knowledge into the unseen, where vast areas of omission & ignorance--long hostile to any seed-drift from our fields of inquiry, almost in an instant, are ablaze with understanding.

Science has given us the liberty to spy into the enthusiasm of sensed-at-truths conjugating in the teeming, frothed earth. It has demonstrated to us the most important portal into the mysteries of birth & burial is this "sensual organ" we call mind. The contemplation of ideas that seem to be teased directly out of the relatedness of earth & the love it flourishes.

Perpetual

Movement. 

In Nature, which is Reality thriving, which is what matters most to the living, movement of whatever-- of sickness, of seed, of rainfall, of ritual, of ruin, of all motion wielded by our tireless efforts at understanding--is, by any laboring organism such as a Watershed, or a Rustic, or a Mycelial network, plain & simple Advancement.

Work advances the value inherit to its Aim. (Do your work, and I shall know you.*)

When I walk now in the mornings of infant winter, the heavy dew and adobe soils of my neighbor's ill-kept headlands cling to my boots. In that "gumball" of earth is a world. I, like a sated fox of figs & blackberries, knowingly carry & scatter the promise of new communities along my path. What clings to my boots are  the Royal Subjects of the Kingdoms of  Bacteria, Protoctist, Fungi, Plant & Animal. Indeed, it is not too great an exaggeration to say the muck I move down-wind is our world! In the beginning, creation was forced not from a fist of clay thrown in the wild, but from a pair of farmer's boots set down in this paradise!.

After each act of creation: more time & work. And though it seems we cycle through both (day & night, cultivate & harvest), nothing that endeavors ever returns to its starting out. Even the path of our planet shivers & rocks in its river of space.  Its revolution, a stream-bed in the fashion of infinitesimal whorls, drawing our Wanderer in toward that fiery, corrupting, conceiving Sun.

Advancement conjures adventure,  & adventure, peril. The nascent rootings of clover like the immune system of mammals, must be open to a world of influence--some dangerous, some lethal. Openness of this kind presupposes the ability to Learn-- an ability the Living possess & whose genius guides all purposeful motion.  Without Learning there can be no movement of information, indeed without the ability to learn how could information be?  How could Life anticipate, as it must in a universe of turbulent newness, without the generation of meaning?

The seed, emerging from its  husk, waits for a promising air (or perhaps, the agricole's heel!). Its parents have received the ritualized instructions, learned over the many, many motions of time, to bear an infant able to grasp the value of the laboring wind--and when that wind comes soaring--to take hold! 

There the Adventure begins.

*R. W. Emerson

 

The Sea, The Galaxy

A creature of gravity & radiation, erosion is both a force & an insight. As the former, it dissolves or wears away the face of our earth by wind, by rain, by ice and by wave. Where we breed & crowd this globe, it moves elemental wealth from above to below.  Mountains swell the fertile valleys with pregnant weatherings, and these same valleys disgorge the residuum of five kingdoms, darkening the heaving rivers that spill and stain blue seas with the color of "dead" soil.

Many that draw breath would agree:  Time ablates. Time wears away youth; drains away the vigor of blood & of brain; unloosens & lets slip our very being to bob & twist & unfurl downstream (upon one of those famous rivers of death!) so that finally, by Time's erosiveness, we, this slough of life, are swept out into the grinding sea.

It would appear stuff persists though always perishing; so what is permanence? What are the stanchions that bear the load of the bridge that spans the incessant flow of living & dying? A Planet! A Galaxy? A  Universe? What manner of Olympian (slightly debauched, but immortal!) travels that way?

Here at the ranch, I encounter a venturing Deity each and every day.  If thy life (and thy death!) is indeed a miracle, it is because of this. It is because of this that erosion itself is but a mode of its permanence.