Like the colour from the setting sun on setting grass, the intervals of growth in the grass comes from a balance between earth and sun and time. It’s beautiful stuff.
The names are just images of humans: those observers who separate in order to come together again, who create such concepts as earth and sun, time, balance, colour and intervals out of the unity of which grass is an expression.
For grass, time is grass. And no less beautiful for it.
What a life it is to live in the sun.
A garden doesn’t have to be humanly planted.
Who knew?
Here she is gathering the threads.
Here’s the finished weaving.
Wondrous work!
Note the tidy landing gear package, the side saddles and the lovely fur coat!
Now, with all that camping gear unfolded just half a second before:
Isn’t she a beautiful one!
Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, tensed like a bow against the wind, waiting to be knocked loose by the deer of the sky.
Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, lying like wind on the face of the water.
Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, waiting to be carried on the face of the wind.
Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, aka Poplar Cotton, catching in splashing waves of green.
Out of a few simple elements, untold complexity and immeasurable delight. The word for that? Why, life.
We are the children of the sun.
I have learned this week what I already knew but had no words for. I am not the gardener in this land, but the garden that the land makes. Needle-and-thread grass makes me, with its sprays of delicate light in the wind and its way of drilling its seeds into the soil using the heating and cooling of days and nights. It is a beautiful plant that connects me to childhood and mystery. It also thrives in this dry climate.
In comparison, the weed-choked land, the gift of bad cattle management, and the orchard land it was developed into a little over a century ago, create different selves. I follow their paths, often unknowingly, and thus am created by them in their image. It is often an ugly image.
It replaces eternal ones, such as this doe and her year-old fawn, who watch me out of the last snow, in sagebrush that has turned weedy from overgrazing by cattle. There is little for them here now, but her gaze tends me, and make me in her image. I am gardened.
Many of the old orchards are weeds of mustard now. The idea of chopping the land into small spaces did not produce people with the ability to develop a culture other than to develop into the weeds that speak most clearly of the introduction of foreign crops in this ancient space. These weeds, and the people who buy and sell the land they grow on, are gardened not by the land and its water but by sets of laws imposed upon them.
But they are still gardened. To say that we, humans, have a garden is to say that we stand in the place of the earth and try to recreate that relationship to our own benefit. Here’s a glimpse into my garden this morning.
It, of course, also gardens me, if I let it. I do. I’m not the only one. A woman down the road has sown poppies in the cheatgrass and rescued a barren, scarred hill into a delight that can recreate the land for thousands.
We make ourselves by tending the land, so that it can tend to us. If we cover it with black plastic to kill that relationship, our children will grow up in a zone of death. It will take time, but it will come. That is not gardening.
This is gardening:
This is respect.
I left the garden today, and all its lettuces, kale, spinach and dill, and went up to the water, where the birches rise out of the cedars and the wild roses.
The ducks were feeding on the blue damselflies and shrimp as clear and white as clouds.
The water showed the directionality of the sun, the coloured space that was blue from one angle, green from another, and from another all gravity and tension.
To my ancestors, there were languages: the language of birch, the language of cedar and the language of water, and sometimes they joined together and then there was song, or consciousness. My ancestors began there in that offering.
Being together with these languages, at the point of their meeting, was like reading cloud or reading the sea room for the weather coming from the north.
I am learning this language again. Poetry was once the tool for speaking it in human form. I learned this art in an old age of the world from a man who had gone to the old ages of the north of the world to find it.
It still is this art. It still is this age of the world. It is still this old earth. It is still this new.
It should not, however, be confused with literature or “communication,” as beautiful as they are. It can be spoken of alongside beauty, if by beauty we mean balance or organic or earthly form.
Speaking it as a garden is not a confusion. From high lakes like this, water leaves the sky and enters the streams and pipes that take it to my red orach, my oregano and my egyptian onions. They drink this. I feed on this, and not just physically.
From high lakes like this, light leaves the sky and enters my garden, too, in a form fitting of these heights. As I am this land, I am this water. It is not, you can see, what is normally called human. Of course it isn’t. This is the old knowledge. It is not humanism. That is a beautiful but far different thing.
To my ancestors, the cupped hands, or the skull, were raised in thanks and blessing. Skold! they said. They didn’t mean the skull, but the bowl it made that held the mind. They didn’t mean the hands, but the bowl — the old world was scale, or Schale, as they said (and say) in German — that held, that was the power of holding, lifting up and offering and that created them through this offering or lifting up.
This is the holding up and the offering, this language of birch and cedar and water. This is where mind becomes.
This is the garden.
Between eye and eye, and mind and mind, there is no distance. Hundreds of millions of years vanish.
Between Earth and the Sun there is a balance, that is both at once. This planet can see. Being seen by her is as much a privilege as seeing back.
Just look at the heat of the sun in the leaves and the cool water of the earth flowing through the warm inner bark of this tree. Let’s teach our children to walk this way instead of through the divided worlds of nature, art and science. Let’s be indigenous.
