Root Cap

Heal Thyself

There is something twisted about “planting” a tree: like debating a Trappist on the virtue of silence, raising mice to feed a cat, pumping ground water to fill a river, or gathering fat pericarps to scatter beneath the munificence of Quercus fecundus.                                           

In a thermodynamically adroit world where the sun is never lifted from Strata, nor dropped from the Enola Gay, trees plant themselves.

Yet no "sapient" can afford to ignore the imperative PLANT A TREE! Nor what that imperative portends, though it now seems
too late for even our deep-rooted friends?

Take You There

There comes a day when the rivering heat, the anticipation of love, & the expectation to hold tight & thrive, exceeds the companionship of the sun, of the watery ambition & excellence of blood; of the careful societies that justify the body & mind. The mild attraction of others engaged with the weather (others who you have nourished) are no longer twinning at your side. The small swarms of coition too common & too numerous to ever describe, are no more of desire. You are alone in the harshest sense: both vulnerable & unwanted. An entire life emptying into one simple declarative: Animal, you are not needed. What is happening now has happened all around, every moment of your way, only you had managed, somehow, to see past the dead.

There are moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a minute to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful & noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the  overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence.  Joseph Conrad  The Heart of Darkness

Meteoric

A metaphor is like the weather: intimate with indeterminate spurts of growth & decay. It is the willfulness of random heat that offers us touch or its stunned absence. What is the "weather of metaphors", becomes for us the intimation of our mutability.

Everyone knows that for each of us, the metaphor of interest is always the weather to come. Not even the old relish the weather that was. The ardent long for the rise & swell that will satisfy.
                                                                                                                                                 
Look at a river & see the stillness that gathers after every rapid. Look at how every pool of quiescence empties again into turbulence.

In The Heat

Creative processes (like weather) require excess the way cellular life requires water. Extreme abundances beset Increase with prodigious & problematic choices. An embarrassment of riches can make the well staked, procumbent. Enormous energies can force upon the supine, the spontaneous. Whet the appetite for dangerous mysteries that do not always provide the much sought for copulation.

The art of engendering novelty is to not know the way. An excess of the free inspires the effort to waft in error & wade through the vague, stumble into the unknown, companion the unanticipated & all the while, find itself entrained by a turbulent mixing that drives it from the deep rooted & leafy edge of tradition into a metaphor of hope; a trope of the fruitful that can defy the “mere contemporary”; as a romance of the prodigies that riot in wild speculation; prodigies of the ecstatic that just might incite the pregnant to yield the future!

In this heat we have left home to be with an old companion & wander the confines of Glacier National. Root Cap shall return in a few weeks to what most certainly will again be novel weather.

The River Within

In California, by mid July, only the devotees of the riparian, or the well rooted or those few able to endure the stone struck ground & bone dry expanse, remain green. All the grasses cannot & turn the color of hare. In the wind, they whip with empty glumes the color of the loping coyote.

A hushed gathering, those that cast a green shroud across the ephemeral streams where many come for relief, languishing beneath the leaf shade; where wizen streams cease to flow & die into dark pools; where blue herons & white egrets gather in the gloom & stride carefully through the murk as they lurch & spear the crowding crayfish rioting the brackish clouds—these last exhalations of a rain three moons past this withering heat & swelling scarcity.

River weather—parlance for the radiance that takes us into the flow. We leave the  dying creek stems & fleeing ground water behind. This charity of winter storms now seek the deeper gradients even as the high sun drives our cognizance & religious desire to its perennial issue: the sacred water-way that courses through all this agriculture. Once, a biblical well-spring that could provoke worship, it lies deep beneath a small, persecutated gathering of companion trees. Uterus of all this fertile valley & source of sustenance for the fabled many that lived among its flooded woodlands, it is now a river that at best suffers an indifferent despoilment , at worst, the victim of repeated rape & tireless brutality.

There was a time when rivers inundated the fields of our rituals; a time when the ceremonies of increase & decay derived much of their meanings from the coitus of Heaven & Mountain & how this union swelled & stained the distant sea. Many then would cast seeds upon Their alluvial sex, left as ooze about the ravished grassland. All our deep soils began & have been sustained by Their copulatory insistance.

Starve religion of its law & governance, of its institutional prestige & sway over tribe & nation-state. Make faith hunger for gods that dwell in primitive brain stems or in the ganglia of the small; that dwell in the cell’s mystical sense of self made buoyant & alive by water. Relieve each of the interest in the theological & abandon the fevers of reason to the riffles & rock blaze. Seek the ecstasies of deliverance & believe in a watery genesis. Strip naked & bathe in rivers for they are sacred & will teach you the importance of movement. Look within & you will find them coursing through high canyon walls, flushing out into wide open valleys & finally penetrating into deep, restless seas. Teeming with sense & idea.

Venous & The Vague

Leaves are the emphasis of sunlight just as rivers are the emphasis of a sea. They mark the importance of the ungovernable & the generous—each incited by the excess they receive. Yet a leaf & a stream are themselves large societies, built-up by cloying entities such as the excess of green cambium or extravagance of turbulent flows. We can relieve either, their obligation to the emphatic & allow both the mark of importance by distinguishing the endeavors of the meristematic that crowd in ecstasy against the rough bark of a branch, or the spontaneities of the diffuse that inspire molecular water to dance the frenzy of stochasticity. Root & rivulet, river & tree, sun & sea urge us to contemplate the important mark of indefinite entireties. For in part, our vagueness is the intensity of so much unaccounted complexity. In part, it is the vigor of all this disorder into solidarity.

Pieris rapae

We value clarity. Honesty is clear. Arithmetic & road maps are clear. Our love for children is clear. To be injured & need help is clear. To be generous is clear. To fear the warrior is clear. To be at war is vague. 

We are vague when we feel celestial heaven. Vague when we touch terrestrial dirt. Vague when we love & vague when we sleep. Vague before birth. Vague before death.

Hope is vague, to care for the old is clear. To want a butterfly is vague. To know its Latin name is clear.

All Is Small

There is no MANY that is not the ONE of another many; each the tendency of union in some other, whose tenuous concordance makes vivid the one: our universe & its expanding emptiness; our endeavoring ecology & its fuse of a sun; our hands & their congress of cells; our atoms & their trembling molecules of river water; our elements of hydrogen & their ensemble of animated matter; our quarks & gluons & their milky way of neutrons & protons.

And than we must not forget our strings & loops & resonances twixt degrees of freedom; our orders chanced upon by chaos: our compenetration of the virtual into determined spacetime. Beyond that, the pristine energy we touch as we go down the black rabbit hole of the vanishingly small that drop us into the ineffably small that cohere the all-is-silence into this familiar charity of the dead evident in the first burst of new starlight! There is no ONE that is not the MANY of some other. Such is companionship. Just look at how stupendous nebulae conspire to solidarity in the small, striding Gerridae.

The Illumination of Love

Old stars lean into the dark with fierce ambitions. What are their dreams? To perish & become what a butterfly is. Give up the light & with the help of a wind, change into whatever intimation of beauty the ferment can bare.

To behold our Sister is to delight in the spontaneity of gas & dust that gather in the interest of love. Such is the freedom that enjoys the living form. Certain is being alive the satisfaction of a sun. Thus liberty where propensities thrive?

Every manifestation of beauty is in anticipation of a perishing star. The ambitions of the dead are intimated in the small who create from an understanding of what each of us are. Alive today, my ways will influence what is born from stellar decay.

Adelpha bredowii