First a note from me:
Substack, the writing platform I am using now, started offering something called NOTES, brief calls to writings, news, sites, poetry. I am still trying to figure it out and you can do the same, if you so desire. Just click on the 3 lines to the right of your screen, then on NOTES. Let me know how you like it!
For now, I cannot resist posting one of my borrowed and not so seriously changed version of a very old and favorite postcard:
Blue is the color of my sprouting early spring waiting for tiny zen-zens and revelations of various things
Early spring at the house starts simple but soon gets complicated. The best time was in mid April, when not much had been decided. But I can still search for bees, butterflies and flies emerging from the ground now, from inside the twigs, from underneath the autumn fallen leaves, from in between the flower buds, the first time ever, a new form or a new hibernating one. I can still hear carpenter bees navigate in a frenzy around a nest. Learn to sit quietly, with eyes closed, while they buzz about, curious to about an inch from my face, but never touching.
Last year, a red-bellied woodpecker brought his family to feast on the larva and left no bee nest untouched. What he did not get, I am sure the wasps got, later in the season, as they set their own nests inside the cavities, hoping to feed their young with the remnants. Today I saw the fine dust on the ground and realized that the drilling of the wood continues…
Then the tiny zen zen blues arrive.
They entered my fields of vision about ten years ago, and now I can, in a millisecond, spot their presence far away, from a bare flicker of air. Times of joy in discovery of some of their favorite grasses, some of their flowers, and one of their secret sleeping places, choosing to rest upside down, if only for a day or for a few hours…
Handed down, generation to generation, and built into their tiny spherical dna's, they come back to roost in the same exact coordinates of the same blade of grass from last season. Not a native host plant roosting spot - just a patch of overgrown grasses, with some perennial flowering weeds, in between. And not the same “individual” butterfly, not at all.
A matter of memory, direction to sunlight, a built-in compass? a friendly place for life, I guess.
Ephemeral and tiny, they seek small flowers, like the early blooming golden ragwort, now renamed packera aurea. This Eastern tailed blue measures no more than half an inch, the flowers an inch and a half.
I learn about their strange relationship with ants. Much like aphids, their caterpillars exude a sweet nectar that the ants love and harvest, while protecting the cats from attacks.
I learn about their sight acuity, meaning that they, the butterflies see you! The “scientific fact” you believe in, the fact that you do not see them, is entirely on your own narrow perspective.
Then, I realize, it becomes real to me that most of these facts, sometimes referred to as entertainment-fun-science, are generated by the multiple lab killings of butterflies and of spiders, of living cells, of organisms, of bacteria and virus. Our so called scientific vision of their internal organs, non-organs, bodies, nucleated or not, this vision is all based upon their death. Our pragmatic build-up of science and knowledge informs our lives, and our own visions, but does not necessarily inform us of our own finitude - the hierarchy seems clear. The feeling-thought hits me hard.
Of course, I am told by the defenders of fact that the research benefits humanity… A good friend suggested, and I am not quite sure if it was in jest and fully digested, “You have to break many eggs to make an omelet.” Emotion gets in the way, he says…
… the sacrifices…we are asked to make for science, for war, for country, for family, for feeling and so on. And the generic so on and reduction science worries me profoundly. Death of a particular species/type/enemy is not important, what counts is the use we make of them…how can they benefit us, the perceived emperors of all species?
Yet death is presented to us in quite glorified pounding waves, in movies, on live television, in literature. It is not facilitated, nor looked squarely on her face. Euphemized versions in the ingestion of plants, almost always promising to lead us elsewhere, eventually leaving behind the old acheing body/tired mind and continuing with usage, on to eternity – enlightenment and possibly even contact upon return?… as ourselves, of course!
I have seen a disproportionate share of death in my personal life, I am sure no more than most people in this wide world, but enough to make me wonder if the focus is not misplaced. Some writers and philosophers now remind me that the glossing over death in search for something other needs to be looked at, re-examined, thought out.
The peripheries of feeling visions are the places I want to visit, to stay there for as long as I am allowed to stay. It requires permission to enter, I am told. Yes. The recovery of re-visions around our eyes, where the images come from?, the newer seeing eyes placed square in between our shoulder blades, where the wings might have grown, (and you laugh…), the peripheral antennae like-eyes around our ears, the walking hands... Sometimes they pop up like balloons in cartoons, like flags in nation rallies, in dream, with playful (and sometimes not so playful) messages that may not need to be interpreted. Just seen, heard, hugged, and felt.
Like the early birds migrating north, the zen zen blues cast shadows on me now. Not from above, not from my human families, but from the tinies below
the peripheral planes of my composting visions
in rays of flight and food for feeling thoughts.
While I know this is not the point of your post, anytime I see mention of Tradescantia, I think of John Tradescant, who was so wonderfully portrayed in Virgin Earth (Phillipa Gregory). I wonder, have you had the pleasure of reading it? :)
Thanks for the suggestion, Elizabeth! No I have not read it but it seems to be part of the larger talk about pastoral usage of the land...