April’s penultimate day, and we are still awaiting the emergence of the aspen leaves.
Virtually all of the other trees have begun unfurling their springs fringes and shawls. Even in yesterday’s snow and sleet, the smaller fire maple’s blossoms began to give way to green, leaves now clearly visible, if not wholly open yet.
That storm has proven to be a great gift: Aside from the softening of the ground, it has reawakened every blade, every leaf, every stalk and branch. All stand a little taller today, a little livelier, reaching for cloud-studded blue skies in a small but steady revival.
We speak much of spring bringing renewal and rebirth, and it does do both of those things, but sometimes, it’s both less and more than that. For the trees, the grass, the shrubs, a great many of the medicine plants and the flowers, wild and otherwise, there is no real death, or at least no permanent one. It is as though spring is the healer that catches each of them in that small space between the process of dying and actual death, catches and holds fast and revives them all with breath that whispers, Not yet.
It’s not quite the same thing as dormancy, and it’s true that these beings should, in fact, merely be dormant in the cold months. Leaves may die, but not limbs; petals, but not seeds.
But in a time of twelve-hundred-year drought, the likes of which no one alive holds even in ancestral memory, in a time when the climate collapses around us a little more each day? Dormancy is no longer guaranteed, nor is renewal at its putative end.
And so, those that may be brought back from the brink — a brink no longer necessarily temporary, seasonal, but perhaps all too permanent — become all the more important now.
The subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation, the image above, reminds us of the spare and fragile beauty of this moment, of its medicine, of the strength and power and, yes, healing to be found in the land’s, the trees’ and grasses’ and other spirits’ striving for renewal. It’s a photo that dates back seven years almost to the very day: from May first of 2017.
Just over two days remain to see whether the aspens will leaf by then this year or not.
I suspect that they will, in fact, not — but that merely counsels patience, not despair. That year was unusual, in terms of the amount of precipitation granted to us from one winter to the next, and in terms of the surface waters readily available to us. We have not had such a year since, and so if the branches are bare some days longer, the grass a little shorter still, the petals not yet truly opened to the light? It will be neither surprising nor cause for alarm.
Yet.
That can change rapidly; worse, it very likely will, and sooner than anyone imagines. But for now, current circumstances who us what remains possible, even in the face of ongoing catastrophe and collapse. Three days of intermittent wintry precipitation, and our small world here is alive again, and striving for renewal.
~ Aji
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