Giving water to the birds, I scan the plants to see
what has survived this winter.
Something small & creamy white on the native honeysuckle (Lonicera albiflora. ). A delicate fold of a flower: cream, pale yellow. I lean over and breathe it in: a scent as beautiful and subtle as the flower itself...not the cloyingly sticky smell of its Japanese kin. This one is a humble native. It has no need to be showy. It has its sense of place & belonging.
What language of the sun & clouds & wind & earth has it heard that it answers with its own flowering? What language do I hear in the finch's joyous exultation and the southern wind-whisper that tells me perhaps for the moment I can unclothe and be warm in my own returning flowering?
For the moment, there is respite from the eternal decline.
The sparrows hear it too: already busy with clumps of grassy stuff clamped in their beaks: nest foundations.
The language of awakening. We need the decline to remind us to pay attention.
A neighbor, bound in the language of hubris, stridently hammers & saws in his shell of a building with a door on the second floor which leads nowhere. Power hammer, power stapler, power saw--generator roaring. He is a powerful man. He stopped listening a long time ago...perhaps even before he acquired human language. The jackhammer was a sure sign of it. And the bulldozer which stripped his bit of earth and left it more sterile than the moon. He poured thick slabs of concrete to make sure it remained that way. I have since quietly cut down the invasive chinaberry tree sprouting up between the cracks, which will be troublesome and destructive in a few years, because he doesn't know enough to do so himself. He is a proud man.
We need the hubris to turn away from it.
Pulpy orange juice thick and round in a blue glass. Taking it to my lips, it is like drinking down the sun. I am warm. I am healthy. I am whole.
This is a language which eclipses the incredible diversity of words that fall from all mouths. Sometimes language is communicated most powerfully through the absence of words in the mute undercurrent of spirit & the senses.
Senses beyond the six.
1/26/2001
Ingrid Karklins