"The Clock Stopped Long Ago"

or Sandia Park, New Mexico

The sandstone glowed in late afternoon sun.  A raven called as it passed overhead, a deep, throaty croak that rang briefly before melting away.  Its wings beat with audible effort—not the quick flutter of the Oregon juncos and scrub jays darting between junipers, but a good, sturdy flap as it pulled against the air.  That, too, melted into nothing.

The afternoon leaned against a vast backdrop of silence.  Small sounds leapt out, like grasshoppers from a meadow, without disturbing the silence at all.

Away from Albuquerque's urban junkyard of a soundscape, on still days in the piñon and juniper deserts of the lower Sandias, white noise disappears.  Not just from cars and airplanes and swamp coolers and power tools, but from nature, too.  No constant, companionable sounds fill the space around you:  no mountain brooks gurgling and splashing, no clattering leaves in aspen trees or big-tooth maples, no grasses thick enough to rustle.  Silence surrounds you like sandstone, shaped only by the sweeping wind.  The coyotes, howling at sunset or in the chill dark before dawn, make little pinpricks of sound, like stars glimmering one at a time in the enormity of space.

Doesn't the rock look like a coyote?

I found myself pondering the middle layer of experience between the very small and the very large—the shady-tree-and-gurgling-brook level of experience—during a few days' stay at a casita in Sandia Park last week.  Ansel Adams said of New Mexico,

"It is all very beautiful and magical here, a quality which cannot be described.  You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake you into it.  The skies and the land are so enormous, and the details so precise and exquisite that wherever you go you are isolated in the world between the micro and the macro, where everything segues under you and over you and the clock stopped long ago."*

The micro and the macro.

Sandstone

The view from that particular bit of sandstone

To say that New Mexico is a place of extremes is certainly true, but maybe not quite enough.  It's more that the stuff that ordinarily lies between extremes, the broad stretch of middle ground where humans tend to look for ease and comfort, is absent.  I can think of many places of spectacular grandeur—the Colorado Rockies, the Grand Tetons, Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains—where you are dwarfed and awed by the magnificence around you.  You have companions in dwarfishness, though.  The forest trees may tower over you, the lakes may be deep and cold, the elk may bugle hauntingly out of a chilly late-summer night; but they are all still somehow on a human scale, comprehensible, embraceable.

Here, though, you feel like the odd one out.  You may be dwarfed by the whole of the landscape, but you are taller than most of the things that grow on it—when anything grows on it at all.

You are like Alice in Wonderland, if she'd been caught between the Eat Me and Drink Me phases, a little too large, or much too small for your surroundings.  You're isolated between the enormous

and the exquisite,

 in awe of both, but not belonging to either.  You feel vulnerable



in an exhilarating way,



and after a long, glorious day of vulnerable exhilaration you are grateful to the junipers, with their soft, shaggy bark,



and to the piñons, with their fair to middling size, for bringing things back (somewhat) to scale.



You know it isn't really a timeless place.  The clock keeps ticking; the modern world does intrude.

Poised as you are, though, between pointillistic details

and wide expanses,

in that deep quiet, you find balance, and a peace that does seem timeless.

And you wish with all your heart, that for a few more days, time really could just stand still.

__________________
*Quoted in New Mexico. A Guide for the Eyes, by Elisa Parhad.

Much Ado about Nothings

or The Power of Fluff

Such a tiny feather, just a 3/4" bit of down that was as white and billowy as a fair-weather cloud.  It came to roost among the thyme-leaf speedwell early last month and stayed for several days.  Next to its airy softness, the speedwell leaves looked thick and heavy; not for them the joy of floating effortlessly on a breeze.  The feather rippled in winds so slight that they were imperceptible to me, dressed against a November morning.  Even when I set my hand right next to it, I wasn't sure whether I was feeling a breath of wind or of imagination.  But then, down is especially good at trapping air, at holding it close against a beating heart, a small body of hollow bones and flight feathers and hunger, where it can warm and insulate.  It is a cushion against the jagged edges of frost.

Butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa)

Late in November the lone seedpod on the milkweed finally burst.  I have never yet been able to resist the feel of the seeds' downy floss, and its touch sent me instantly back to childhood:  pressing my thumb along the inside seam of a seedpod to break it open, easing apart the featherbed inside and teasing out the individual seeds, then sending them flying, one by one, on a breath.  Those days, I wasn't particularly interested in the seeds, only in the parachutes that held them so magically aloft in ways that the swingsets at school just couldn't manage. I didn't give a thought to the responsibility those bits of fluff carried with them, to keep their own lifeline going.  But they did teach me the joy of occasionally casting your fate to the winds.

Thyme-leaf speedwell (Veronica oltensis)

The speedwell didn't mind the frost the other morning any more than it had minded the feather.  Just to give you a sense of scale, its leaves are only about 1/8 inch across.  The ice crystals on them are tiny, indeed.  Some had been just pinpoints of water vapor before alighting on the colder surfaces of the leaves, where they condensed and froze.  It's hard to believe such delicate particles had the power at their backs to fell the milkweed overnight, to cast it into a deep sleep as surely as a bite from a magic apple.  

Even mid-December has days of fair-weather clouds—"decorative clouds", as one of my favorite weather forecasters calls them.  You don't expect any moisture from them, and they don't really get in the way of the sunshine.  They just cast softly shifting patterns across the sky that mesmerize you with their fluidity.  They float along in such an easy way, like milkweed seeds held aloft and slowly spinning, drifting on the wind.   That effortless buoyancy, though, belies their enormity.  They carry 350,000,000,000 water droplets per cubic foot (according to the The Cloudspotter's Guide).  "Modest-sized clouds" weigh as much as a 747 or possibly 6,268.75 blue whales—about as many as you can shake a fish at in a day.  Even smallish clouds stretch to a kilometer in diameter.

And from here they look as light and insubstantial as a bit of down.

Kasha-Katuwe

or Making an Impression

The rock crumbled beneath my hand.  I had leaned on it for balance to take an odd-angled photo, expecting it without thinking to be solid.  Instead it was ash, pumice, tuff—I'm not sure which, but one of the softer volcanic layers comprising the white cliffs of Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument.  The cliffs and hoodoos there look strong and imposing, but at a touch the edges wear away, filling your regretful hand with dust, the six million year old relic of a cataclysm.  You let it fall, and it leaves delicate, white traces on your palm, as if you've just set free a moth.

On the last of my vacation outings a couple of weeks ago, I spent the afternoon wandering the short trails at the monument.  I think of Kasha-Katuwe (White Cliffs, in the Keresan language of neighboring Cochiti Pueblo) as a "heart of New Mexico" place—it embodies many of the most distinctive features of the region, all in one exciting area.  The rock formations, where wind and water have worn away the softer layers beneath hard capstones, are certainly fascinating.

I apologize for my bad habit of photographing light-colored rocks in the desert at noon on sunny days.  In the center left, though, you can see more of the hoodoos with capstones; another clearish one is at the lower right.

When the hoodoos lose their capstones, erosion takes place more quickly (and maybe even more dramatically).

The contrast between extremes is strong:   one minute you're driving through sleepy settlements in hardscrabble land, aware of boarded-up windows and dust in the little village of Peña Blanca, and the next you're walking through wonders in Kasha-Katuwe's Peralta Canyon while crows hint of darker mysteries in the sky just out of view.

You are conscious of the elements not in the gentle, domesticated way we play with them in gardens—a pool of water, a set of wind chimes—but as untamable dynamos with weight and strength and power and relentlessness behind them, as mindless forces before which you are soft and small.  You see how the wind chisels away layer upon layer of crumbling stone.

You walk through a slot canyon formed by flash floods and (always) more wind.

I'm 5 foot 7 and don't recall bending under that huge stone in the left-hand picture to go into the slot canyon.

Even in the mild days of autumn, you're aware of the fiery strength of the sun and grateful to the trees and hills that shade you from it.

You see life—stubborn, insistent, resilient life—in all its creativity and passion for continuity:

The people in the first two photos give a sense of scale to the roots on the ponderosas.

and you are aware of it hanging in the balance, walking the razor edge with oblivion:

In many of the earth's other extreme places you can be aware of existence both reduced and exalted to its bare bones.  This is the corner I'm walking in now.

Sometimes all you can do is wander in awe.

Lux Aeterna

or In Memoriam

September 11, 2011

Frankly, I wish today weren't a posting day.  Light-hearted wordplay doesn't seem appropriate, any more than a blithe glance at a flower or two, but tackling 9/11 seems impossible.  Everything I've tried to write has either been soppily emotional or party-line political; the former is self-indulgent ten years later, and the latter inadequate to the horror of that day and the unknowns that followed it. 

But it is a posting day.  In the midst of relentless—and moving—media coverage, I've found myself thinking not so much about September 11 as about September 12, 2001.  The 12th was the third day of a new semester, and I didn't know how, or why, in the aftermath of that devastation I was going to walk into a 9:00 class and teach a music history lesson on Gregorian chant.  The whole thing seemed irrelevant to the point of being grotesque.  The day before students had been weeping (oh, what an inadequate word for their grief and fear) on the main quad:  many had friends, brothers, parents working in the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, some of whom had lost their lives.  And I was going to be talking about 1,000 year old music in Latin, with no harmony, no particular rhythms, and tunes you couldn't hum in scales you didn't know.  How could that possibly matter to anyone post-9/11?  For those first days, priorities had been reduced to their bare bones.  Life.  Death.  Safety.  Solace.  Not "enrichments" like long-dead musical styles.

What I eventually came up with, what allowed me to meet my own eyes in the mirror that day, was the knowledge that discussion is the life's blood of a civilized society.  The study of music, painting, literature, is only about three parts fact to seven parts opinion.  No matter what you present in class, you are always bumping up against differences in taste.  Somewhere between the cowardly white-washing of "everyone's entitled to her own opinion" (end of conversation) and the arrogance of "your ideas are stupid, because they're not mine" (end of conversation), lies the middle ground of engagement, where evidence is weighed, reasoning tested, ideas traded, minds stretched.  The arts, I thought, teach us to have those conversations, to respect well-grounded differences.  They teach us to be civilized.  They teach us how to live with one another in peace.

The last ten years have not borne out that bit of wishful thinking; the long-term reaction to a trauma can be as damaging as the original crisis.  "Help me to understand your reasoning" is a phrase that seems to have disappeared from this polarized, entrenched society, along with reasoning—the common-sense, open-minded weighing of evidence—in general.  Still, the idea of 9/11 as "A Day of Service and Remembrance" seems to be gaining ground.  Perhaps that means we're beginning to get out of the trenches, to reach out.  Perhaps we're beginning to heal not only from the vicious wounds inflicted by terrorists but from the subtler ones we've visited on ourselves.

Perhaps.

6:46 a.m. Mountain Time, 8:46 a.m.  Eastern Time, September 11, 2011

In memory of those who died on September 11, 2001 and in its aftermath:

• 2,977 in the attacks, representing more than 90 countries and all major faith traditions, 403 of whom were first responders
• 7,503 American and coalition forces in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
• an estimated 13,375-33,000  Afghan civilians (conflict-related deaths)
• an estimated 100,000-650,000 Iraqi civilians (conflict-related deaths)

From the Gregorian Mass for the Dead:

Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine,	May eternal light shine on them, O Lord,
cum sanctis tuis in aeternum,	with Thy saints for ever,
quia pius es.	because Thou art merciful.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,	Grant the dead eternal rest, O Lord,
et lux perpetua luceat eis,	and may perpetual light shine on them,
cum sanctis tuis in aeternum,	with Thy saints for ever,
quia pius es.	because Thou art merciful.

"What Good Is the Firefly"

or The Wonder and the Joy

We don't actually have fireflies in the western U.S.  My first encounter with them was at the age of 25, on a late summer trip to Ithaca, New York, driving at twilight over the back roads of the midwest.  After I had rhapsodized about them for a while to a friend from Ohio, she told me, "You're probably in more danger from them now then you would have been as a child."

Danger. I hadn't thought of them that way, but she was so right.  I was indeed in danger—of finding fireflies entrancing and magical, of losing sleep and getting mosquito-bitten for the pleasure of staying up late to enjoy the flickering lights, of being immersed in that ephemeral experience.  I suppose the alternative was to see fireflies as, well, insects, as normal summer pleasures/annoyances that—I don't know what for sure, never having seen them as normal—maybe keep you from sleeping well, or that make messes when they smash on your windshield.

All to say, a dear friend just sent me Ballistics, a book of Billy Collins' poetry (Gary, you are as ever a wonder and a joy), a lovely companion to summer evenings on the patio, with small thoughts that glimmer and spark before leaving you again in the half-light, aware of something else in the air beyond you.  In one of the poems, "No Things," Collins muses tongue in cheek on the martyr's impulse to pursue the big, dire questions in life rather than dive into small immediacies like the morning flower, the sparrow, the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table—things that in the right frame of mind give rise to wonder, maybe even joy.

What good is the firefly,
the droplet running along the green leaf,
or even the bar of soap spinning around the bathtub

when ultimately we are meant to be
banging away on the mystery
as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?

At the risk of sounding self-serving, "No Things" gave voice to my approach in Microcosm, and I laughed aloud with delight when I read it, not because of the blog, but because it was such a pleasure to find a companion in thought.  Solemnly, dourly pursuing the "big questions" in the void of your own head—how can you know that any quest in such a closed world will lead you down the right road, or even a real one?  But if you stop to marvel at the small things that present themselves—really marvel—you might be surprised at how the "big" questions dissolve inside them.

So, more than most, this post is an ode to wonder, to small happenings, to oddities, to joy.  As Collins suggests in "Despair," the fraternal twin to "No Things," the "ancient Chinese poets" still have much to offer us, especially "Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things/could hardly be restrained,/and...his joyous counterpart in the western provinces,/Ye-Hah."

From the western provinces, amigos—yee-haw!

__________________
Do, do, do read Billy Collins.

I don't know if one of those disclaimer-y things is necessary here, but I'm really not officially reviewing these poems or anything—as I said, a friend sent them to me for my enjoyment, and I enjoyed them, and there you are.

A Long Reach

or Dispersed on the Wind

I.

The smell raised hackles on the back of your neck you didn't even know were there.  Fire—fire—powerful, immediate.  Smoke pooled on the roads and dimmed streetlights; its acridity caught in your throat and stung your eyes. The city's emergency lines were flooded with calls, and officials must have had a sleepless night before ascertaining that no fire was burning in town.  The smoke, so fresh that you could taste the pine in it, had blown in from the White Mountains in eastern Arizona, more than 200 miles away.

Since Thursday, the night when we first encountered its smoke here in Albuquerque, Arizona's Wallow Fire has burned more than 180,000 acres and is still zero percent contained.  What it must be like closer to its source I shudder to think.  Yet even though the fire has grown, for us the effect has dimmed.  We've had haze and ash, but not that powerful sense of presence.  It was only the first night that wind conditions were right to give the smoke such a long reach.

Sunrise through smoke (and an upstairs window screen—sorry about that...)

II.

I'm always amazed at how deeply into an ecosystem a single plant can reach.  Take Apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa), for example.  It's a native shrub of the rose family that grows on mesas and gravelly slopes from Texas to California, a range of maybe 500 by 800 miles, spanning a stretch of country that does not molly-coddle its plants with such luxuries as, say, water.

Apache plume with color-coordinated spider

Apache plume can endure just about anything, including cold, heat, drought, salt, excessive calcium, malnutrition, alkalinity—anything except for wet feet in winter (and really, who can blame it).  It blooms with varying degrees of enthusiasm from April until Octoberish, its flowers and seed plumes gracing the plant at the same time.  The seeds generally cling tightly but eventually disperse on the wind (especially if you run your fingers through them as you walk past).

This little shrub stabilizes slopes, prevents erosion, provides forage for deer and other browsers, offers nectar to insects, and gives shelter to small birds.  At a conservative guess, a good score of species depend on it for their survival.  A couple of winters ago I saw a small flock of ruby-crowned kinglets taking cover and lunching on some incidental insects in an Apache plume here in town; they barely moved the leaves as they worked out their complicated seating arrangements.  They had such bright, interested eyes.

III.

I've been thinking about things that have a greater reach than you expect as I've been writing this, my 100th post, on the eve of my blog's one-year anniversary.  When I started writing I wanted Microcosm to be three things:  a creative outlet, a reason to look more closely at everyday beauty, and a way to connect with people with similar loves and interests.  On all three counts it has more than met my expectations.  I have loved the whole process of looking, thinking, photographing, writing, crafting.  Having ("having") to look closely and see things afresh for an admittedly self-imposed but still twice-a-week deadline has given me a passion for looking closely that, if anything, has grown beyond its starting point.

Somehow all of these thoughts, dispersed on the winds of cyberspace, have found readers.  And you, my dears—you have opened up your lives and gardens in turn and offered a camaraderie that is beautiful and precious.  Bless you.  After all, you've been with me as I've mused about the nature of weeds, gone dreamy-eyed about hot-air balloons, fretted about the coming of winter, and waxed rhapsodic about spring migration.  What reward can I give you? 

None, except that of appreciation, and my companionship in return.

Sometimes I wonder how much more interpretation a scant 400 square feet of garden (including patio space) can sustain.  I've begun to wonder that with every single post—what can I say new about flowers or leaves or stems or fruit?  What does the patio have to offer today that I haven't already shared with you?  Somehow, Mother Nature always comes through.

You'd be surprised what a long reach she has.

The Rhythms of Care

or Food and Drink

Work, and of the best sort. 

Yesterday:  a few minutes watering seedlings in the micro-garden; a trip to the hardware store for concrete blocks, rebar, and bamboo poles; an afternoon spent chatting with the neighbors and turning my purchases into a stand for the rain barrel, stakes for the Lady Banks rose (trust me, she would eat a fancy trellis for lunch), and supports for the "Coronation Gold" yarrow, which otherwise will give way to the first windstorm (and every windstorm thereafter).  —An afternoon to water all the beds, as the 0.11 inches of moisture we've received so far this year can't kick-start spring in a young garden; a few more minutes to empty the pots of perennials that didn't survive our once-in-fifty-years cold spell.

Today:  more of the same only better, in 55°F morning temperatures, in a sheltered, walled garden that warms to tank-top comfort levels.  The tasks:  cleaning and filling the bird and bug baths (setting some dried navy beans to soak); moving the "volunteer" feverfew seedlings to containers, where their blossoms will attract beneficial insects for weeks in mid-summer (taking a few moments' rest in the Adirondack chair); watering the seedlings in the micro-garden again (ducking inside for a glass of water); dividing the "Moonshine" yarrow and moving the divisions to a sunnier bed, out of the growing desert olive trees' shade (lying down for an hour's bedrest); moving the Keller's yarrow from the sand cherries' shade to the sunny, more-or-less native bed (putting the beans on to cook); working coffee grounds and tea leaves into our alkaline, "decomposed granite" soil (harvesting tarragon and garlic chives).  Resting, before the white bean salad with Shannon's citrus-tarragon vinaigrette goes on the table.

This weekend, I've been thinking about the rhythms of care—the seasonal care we give to the garden, the daily care; the sometimes competing, sometimes complementary care we give to ourselves; and the sometimes out-of-the-blue priority we give to a work ethic that may or may not be helpful.  It's been disconcerting to remember the extent to which need (the yarrows, in too much shade; a thirsty human) can end up competing with function (the garden could use some filler here; I still have this one task left to finish...).  How do we balance them—work and care? the drive to accomplish something right away and the natural rhythms of growth, of need?  Somehow or other we do, and things either work out or they don't.  For the most part, only small things hinge on our decisions—one human, one garden, a handful of plants, perhaps a few bees; things that matter in a small sphere, that may accumulate to have a wider effect, but that don't (with an ironic bow in the direction of chaos theory) affect the world at large.

From time to time, however, something mammoth interrupts the easy seasonal rhythm of care, reminds us of the world beyond our garden walls, shouts that other gardens need tending, that other humans need the food and drink of compassion.  While our kindred in Japan have a strong and resilient system to cope with natural disasters, the recent tsunami reminds us all how fragile our security really is, how great a leveler nature can be.  I haven't researched the organizations that exist internationally to contribute toward disaster relief, but in the USA, InterAction.org is a starting-point directory of NGOs; other longstanding charitable organizations are accepting contributions as well, of course.

Sometimes care extends beyond our garden walls, and giving becomes our work—work of the very best sort.

Sunset Boulevard

 or Being Willing to Be Moved

Loretta was a fount of good advice, all dispensed in a whiskey tenor.  Jabbing at the map with fingers yellowed by nicotine, she pointed out the cheapest gas stations and choicest views, the tourist traps and real finds.  She radiated no-nonsense, small-town westerner in a worn-to-softness plaid flannel shirt and faded blue jeans; her hair, an equally faded gray-blond, was feathered back 1970's-style.  She may have parked her 4x4 pickup truck in the closest parking space—the kind that really should have been reserved for guests—but she had the knack of a good concierge for steering travelers toward what they would most enjoy.

Loretta reigned over a little B and B in Williams, Arizona, one of the "gateway" communities to the Grand Canyon, and had probably seen every variety of tourist known to humankind.  She knew all the questions before they were asked, could spout the answers (and probably offer an appropriate brochure) in her sleep, and gave the general impression of not being easy to surprise or impress.  But when she found out I'd never been to the Canyon before, her face softened unexpectedly.  "I grew up here in Williams," she said.  "I worked up at Bright Angel Lodge right on the Canyon for years."  Her eyes looked off into a remembered distance.  "I've seen the Canyon all my life, and I've never seen it look the same way twice."

I've been thinking this week about that conversation from a couple of years ago, and about Loretta's willingness to be moved by a wonder she was so familiar with.  I was standing at the upstairs window, looking at a bright splash of sunset, and being a little impatient with it, as it was starting to interfere with dinnertime.  "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, it's not like the sun won't set again tomorrow," said a rather snide inner voice.

My own jadedness took me aback.  Just because the sky is omnipresent and unavoidable doesn't mean it isn't still amazing.  It's just as varied as the Grand Canyon under shifting clouds; the same view from the same window, day after day, isn't actually the same view.

So in a Grand Canyon frame of mind, I offer the following collage of roughly a week's worth of sunset photos, all (obviously) from the same vantage point.  Even the ones that are comparatively dull have their own character, their own statement to make on the quotidian fact of sundown.  (The collage is best viewed large—just click on the image.  For the record, I haven't altered the colors in any way.)

You're right, Loretta—you can look at it all your life and never see it the same way twice.

In Our Element(s)

or Staying Off Balance

The breeze this morning was a gift from our friends in Canada—fresh, brisk, invigorating.  And, not to sound critical or unappreciative or anything, it was also rather...cold.

The sun, on the other hand, was strong and warm—warm enough that despite the cool 23° temperature I could take advantage of a day off work to spend some time on the patio.  Dressed from head to toe in black to soak up the sun's heat, I was perfectly toasty.  Wistful, perhaps, to be all dressed up to be in a spy movie and then not to have one handy, but toasty.

The contrast between wind and sun was a delicious one, the line between cold and warm sharply drawn.  Each was experienced with the same intensity at the same time—they reminded me of a sink in an older house, where the hot and cold water run from separate taps.  It was the kind of day in any case where you're vividly aware of wind and sun, a giant blue-sky day free of clouds from horizon to horizon, the kind where you soak up freshness, space, the blue of the upper atmosphere, the white-hot ball of sun burning its arc across it.  I guess I don't normally experience wind and sun quite so independently of each other as I did today. Their separation had something bare-bones about it; they were reduced to their elements:  Air.  Fire.

Earth.  Once I started thinking about elements, earth wasn't really hard to find.  In the garden plenty of bare earth still shows, whether in the bed I haven't yet had the energy to mulch with gravel, or in places where the winds have stripped away the bark and leaf mulch.  At this time of year, it is a dusty place, and a microcosm of the New Mexico landscape in general, where plants always seem to get stuck playing second fiddle to the plain old ground.  Usually, every wind carries a comet's tail of dust along with it; today's didn't, and the earth stayed put.  It was kind of nice.

The only element missing from the picture this morning was water.  That's really no surprise in the high desert—if I had to come up with an elemental recipe for Albuquerque, it would be something like three parts each of air, fire, and earth to one part water.  (Mix until crumbly.)  The normal balance of the elements is one that's out of balance. 

Even for here, though, things are dry.  Last week's snow and ice didn't yield much moisture, since the wind evaporated them before they could melt.  We really haven't had much precipitation since a wonderful rain in December, and the ground is dry for a long way down.  I was trying to decide this morning whether to water when it warms up this weekend—whether to tip the balance a bit more in favor of moisture, in favor of the young plantings that probably don't have the roots to withstand prolonged drought just yet—or whether to leave the balance off-balance, and let the plants' need for water play second fiddle to earth, air, and sun for a while longer.  Normally when I try to fix things like that, I mess them up instead, so for now it's probably better to let the balance take care of itself without my interference.

After all, in the wild the plants don't seem to mind second fiddle.

Drama?

or A Matter of Perspective

I can't figure out whether last week in New Mexico was one big, mad scramble or whether everything came to a screeching halt.  It felt like both, really.  Perhaps that's the essence of an emergency—a lot of frantic activity in an effort not to lose ground.

We actually had some severe weather, you see, the kind that seldom happens here, with snow, ice, Arctic winds, and bitter cold all at once.  Record-breaking sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures combined with natural gas shortages to deprive some 30,000 homes of heat, and led the governor to declare a state of emergency.  Schools were closed for four days; the universities, national labs, and state offices shut down to conserve gas.  Pipes froze and burst, furnaces went on the fritz (I had a little of that drama myself), some cities even had rolling blackouts.  Churches and school buildings turned into impromptu emergency shelters.  In Albuquerque, where many people don't own ice scrapers, let alone serious mittens or boots, many chose not to venture out at all.

So once the cold eased up and I'd had a chance to inspect the garden for damage, I just had to laugh at the contrast.   Yes, a couple of plants that weren't really thriving seem to have received the coup de grâce, and the ones that are only semi-evergreen have lost their leaves, but look what the Lady Jane tulips accomplished this week:

They've grown a good two to three inches since the last time I looked.  And the tarragon—one of the most tender plants I grow—broke ground in some new places:

The little nubs of crocuses coming up have turned into definite leaves, the catmint has fuzzy new growth at its base, and generally, most of the plants are acting like this weather never happened.

While all this drama has been carrying on in the human world, while we've all been fussing and worrying and hunkering down, the garden has been quietly getting on with things.  The realization made me catch my breath—it was one of those moments when you catch a brief glimpse into something alien and beautiful, when you realize what a different rhythm plants are attuned to and catch the faintest echo of it yourself.  The frantic tempo of wind and weather—so dangerous to us—doesn't really seem to matter to them.  Secure in their rootedness, pacing themselves to the slow ebb and flow of seasons, their priorities are elsewhere.  The days are lengthening; the sun is getting stronger.  And so, snow and wind and cold notwithstanding, buds are fattening, tulips leafing out, and new growth stirring underground.  It's as if the weather that affects us so powerfully is completely beyond their ken.

In the rock-paper-scissors game of gardening, of course, sometimes weather does trump seasonal instinct.  (I would encourage any plants that are listening to remember that our average last frost date isn't until the middle of April.)  But what a lovely manner of living—to be attuned to something beyond the fuss and bother of momentary squalls, to respond to a larger pull and tug toward life.

I almost want to say, "Amen."