The Snow Buckwheat Country:
All at Once
The Grass Country:
One…
…by…
…one.
It’s not indigenous if it isn’t expressing the energies of the land.
The energies are there for all to read, all together or one at a time.
They are still being born.
They are countless and perfect.
Born from suns themselves.
At home in the complex interstellar environment.
And now they are leaving home.
Soon they will drift on the interstellar winds.
Among supernovae.
Through solar flares.
Among nebulae…
… and star clusters of all kinds.
It is the season for floating to the far corners of the universe.
… and beginning again.
The universe doesn’t extend.
It deepens and curves.
Look at the yellow dock gone to seed.
Look at a mule deer plant it in the sun.
There is balance in beauty and beauty in balance.
Everything leaves its trace.
While making arrangements for my father’s funeral a week ago, I walked down at dawn to the mouth of Simm’s Creek, on Eastern Vancouver Island. No, this is not rain.
Four years from now, with some incredible luck, this plucky little salmon will be coming home.
Others like it will be returning to the fire forests (note the smoke) over the mountains to the east. Fire, water and fish: it is enough.
What starts out cool and soft and evaporating out of stone …
… leaves stone behind, warm and hard and singing in the wind.
These are the mysteries.
She doesn’t know spring, summer or fall, drought or rain. She just knows the flow within twigs.
Her connection with the earth is that sure and self-contained.
This is how to walk through the face of the sun.
Pretty great, eh! NASA, sorry guys, but we’re already there.
Celebrate the season!
It’s a colour palette for rejoicing.
Art without four seasons. Life without four seasons. Life with dozens, often two at the same time, passing through each other like clouds!
What a beautiful dance.
Those of us who talk about grasslands, talk about their rounded curves a lot.
Hey, Glaciers, thanks for that.
This is a land held in tension against wind and light, using opposition to it to create tension, which is then harvested in spring growth …
…or the dispersal of seeds.
But this is summer now. It’s the time for of the most beautiful angles. In this landscape of wind off the distant Pacific, mountain ranges away …
… ranges of glacially-cut, angular, uplifted-peaks of ancient, fractured continental collisions…
… arrow-leafed balsam root, swaying in the wind in spring…
…shifts in angles to the other plants nearby to catch the sun, and dries in place, like rain spread flat. This is rain lifted to a whole other plane of experience.
Move over, Picasso. You ain’t got nothing on this.
One after another,the grassland opens further. Something is ripening here.
It’s easy to share space if you are thin, and working on rhythms of opening and closing that intersect at the point at which one species needs water and another needs to release it.
It is the way a trout holds still in a flowing pool.
It helps to signal your presence.
Even petals can rise and fall in the rhythms of this pattern. Look how they are falling out in the bloom below in the opposite sequence from which they came in.
Going to seed in sequence helps. There are no clear seasons here.
It’s all one-after-the-other here. For humans, it’s all-at-once. That’s how a migratory, predatory species thinks through individuals that come together into groups by releasing its defenses and including the other within the self. That’s profound, but so is the grassland that thinks together. Every space that is closed opens.
This is water’s journey. It falls from the wind, opens into life, and then, when the wind is a closed space, opens again into the wind: opening after opening after opening opening openings.
Only a grassland thinks like this. Only water thinks this way here.
This is the spirit of a grassland. Here, and this is the big secret, humans can let down their boundaries and live in the sky as well, by extending the social group to these ends.
We are not just a predatory species. These grasslands are our ancient homes. Much has been forgotten, but much has been remembered, too. We are remembering it now as we put a close to the closings below.
