SPRING, SPRANG, SPRUNG!

I don’t think you want to hear about the frustrating interruptions, those writer’s complaint become cliche’. Maybe, though, a brief report on the hundred gray limbs of bare trees scribbling at the sky beyond my desk window, or a glimpse of the first unfurling green fern—a bracken

—and the tentative opening on the Opal Miller Worthy Memorial Pear Tree,

pink pistils visible only with the zoom lens, the brief shouts of green from all around the yard

and, wonder of wonders, the Yellow Jessamine in yellow puffs against the lightening of the sky; maybe you would like to see these.

Signs of spring are here but, in contrast, the cypresses on the opposite bank of the Suwannee--even though they have today's last sunlight--stand in dark opposition to a change of season.

The wisteria, too, holds tight its buds, its brown ropes of vine, not giving, not yet.

And, here, in front of me, oblivious to the changing of winter into spring is His Royal Highness, King of Lot 22, Thomas Branford Caramel Cauthen:

CLEARING THE DECKS! THE CALENDAR!

CLEARING THE DECKS, THE CALENDAR!

Jan and Feb are a blur; please, let March not be a blur. Let it be discrete hours within discrete days, each opening like the first magnolia blossoms on Fraternity Row at Ole Miss, those plate-sized white blossoms I stole for a grand occasion.

TODAY, I saw this little fellow in the roadside grass:

Within each day of this hallowed March, let me write something worth the time and trouble and insistence and frustration incurred in clearing the March calendar to make possible that writing.

THIS AFTERNOON SPENT WITH JOSIE MICHELLE WATKINS ON THE DECK:

I have everything here that I need: eyes, brain, hands, keyboard, IMAGINATION. I have characters walking around this house, talking to themselves. They are saying things about having been neglected far too long. I am afraid of mutiny, certain they consider abandoning me for some more faithful writer, one who got her books all written and published when she was younger, never letting anything get in the way.

[Photo of white blossoms by Robert Baxter of Suwannee Bend in north Florida]

BEYOND MY WINDSHIELD:

SPRING, 2011
RED MAPLE SEED PODS

MAUVE OF THE REDBUD TREES

WHITES OF THE PLUM TREES

YELLOW PINE POLLEN 1/2 INCH THICK ON THE WINDSHIELD ITSELF!

COME SUNDAY! Meet MAGGIE RIDER & FRIENDS & hear LLOYD BALDWIN'S MUSIC

J Rifkin on Human Possibility

"If human nature is materialist to the core--self-serving, utilitarian, and pleasure-seeking--then there is little hope of resolving the empathy/entropy paradox. But if human nature is, rather, at a more basic level, predisposed to affection, companionship, sociability, and empathic extension, then there is the possibility, at least, that we might yet escape the empathy/entropy dilemma and find an accommodation that will allow us to restore a sustainable balance with the biosphere.

A radical new view of human nature has been slowly emerging and gaining momentum, with revolutionary implications for the way we understand and organize our economic social and environmental relations in the centuries to come. We have discovered Homo empathicus."

SURPRISE! OLD ASSUMPTION IS WRONG!

THE RACE TO GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS---as our resources are running out.

Don't miss this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g

OH, ISN'T IT BEAUTIFUL?

The world, this Florida-on-the-Suwannee, late-afternoon world, I mean; all movement and color, gnarled oaks' limbs dipping in the wind. The wind, invisible presence that it is, amazes me. At end of day, from under an electric blanket, I survey the blue and saffron ribbons criss-crossed by the dark lines of the trees' arms against the sky. On my queenly couch 12 ft off the ground, I lie back and watch the day wind down; it has been a day of egg-yolk yellow pansy faces, a raking of pinestraw adn hanging of laundry, stripes of sunlight on the boards of the deck, one small wren pecking at the window after I came in.

Far in the west, the sun lowers itself, inch by inch, toward the forest of the Florida interior that is my horizon. At 6:00 P.M., it illuminates the greens and golds of the stained glass window Mama got from the Alachua Baptists' old yellow brick church when it was torn down in the 70s. Mama's 1918 baptism was the first inside those yellow walls.

Although I grew up in the countryside, my love of the natural world must have been reinforced at First Baptist where I sang songs like "This is my Father's world/I rest me in the thought/Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas; His hand the wonders wrought."
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Indeed, this evening I couldn't help wondering just how often observers must attribute the invisible stirrings of the wind to God. Years back, a neighbor here on the Suwannee confided that she had prayed Katrina away from us; mmm, I thought, probably shouldn't tell that. What should one tell? How much?

Tonight I'm paying homage to my beginnings, thanking the Baptists for that song I sang so demurely, never picturing hurricanes, alligators, or canebrake rattlers, never realizing I would come to love the power of storms as well or better than placid days of sunshine. But, I do; I love the surprise, the danger, the reminder that I am small, just a part of the whole wide world, a speck in the cosmos. Or is it cosmi? Cosmoses?

My childhood sureness is long gone, but my wonder, my delight in mystery, my curiosity are far more thrilling than I ever could have dreamed, standing next to a window inside the yellow church with gold and green shadows falling over me.