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May 31, 2001
Put Away the Maypole
Too soon, the season runs its course.The trees are fully leafed-out now, and though their greens are still darkening, the dense foliage has but few birds to hide, as the migration draws to a close, along with the month of Maying.
It all happened so fast.
Spring is part of a pattern, yet each Spring has a pattern of its own. This one came to a head in a brief spell of unseasonably warm weather early in May, but then, in an inversion of the usual pattern, turned cool and damp towards the end of the month.
Still, its charges are accomplished.
The calendar shows three more weeks of Spring, but the next warm front is apt to smack of Summer. The first broods of fledgling birds have already left the nest (these are local breeders), while seeds of Maple, Elm and Ash are in the wind. The Groundhog, however he spent the Winter, has overcome his fear of shadows, and was seen on the Mount last weekend.
Me, I just turn in circles, chasing after last year's patterns, or last week's, until the moment overcomes my preconceptions, revealing naked acts of being, patternless as Now.
These moments may be strung together, through memory and through anticipation. In such a way, we may discover just where it is we stand today.
Today we say goodbye to May.
I will leave you with what I sought at the beginning of the month, but, typically, could not obtain until its end. After a gray and rainy stretch, Memorial Day dawned with a morning beyond the dreams of those who slumber through the break of day. Fleeting in its glory, its lucent beams creased by the trees, igniting banks of dawn-spawned mist, one last May morning coalesced inside the camera lens.
This was it.
May 29,2001
Beech Party
May 28, 2001
Memory Day
Memorial Day again, and I think I’ve said that I don’t have much use for martial commemorations. There are no holy wars, and holidays are markers of another sort. For every war is meant to be the last, while every holiday is but the next, the latest repetition of our way of being. “Remember, lest we repeat”, they say, but what we remember is what we do; memory itself is repetition, and war is best forgot.We remember, and we forget.
Memory cannot embalm the living moment,
nor forgetfulness vitiate the existential fact.
To turn towards, or to turn away:
the Holiday is in your choice.
On this day that ushers in the leisure season, memory serves to ingratiate the past in the eyes of the future; to ease the passage of the one into the other. The point of exchange is the site of celebration.
Here is a bargain between past and future, and the fulfillment of a promise.
The American Chestnut, recalled from the depths of forgetfulness. These are the trees that were planted last Spring, atop the Great Hill. The latest in blight-resistant cultivars, these Chestnuts seek to reintroduce a forgotten presence to the local biome. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Hill grows another Chestnut, this one a literal memory. It is not planted, but likely a sprout from what remains of one of the old trees, killed back by the blight. The roots do not die, but continue to put forth new stems, which eventually succumb to the pathogen, a fate the new trees are designed to escape.
For now, it’s all in the past and in the future. The trees look indistinguishable, though separated by heritage and potential. Between those poles, new leaves unfold, ephemeral as Spring.
May 16, 2001
I went out one morning in May
Gathering flowers, all so gay
I gathered red, I gathered blue
Every little thing that a love could do
Appalachian folk song
What is so rare about a day in May?
That it falls in the fullness of Spring, and embodies every promise that the season holds.
I enter at dawn, 110th Street and Lenox Avenue, the Farmer's Gate. I scan the Harlem Meer, and its island, peaceful in the twilight. Later the shore will teem with patrons; strolling; sitting; fishing. Even now it is not deserted: the odd runner or dog-walker is always there. The Park is never truly deserted, but if ever it is peaceful, it's in the early morning.
Spring itself is less than peaceful. We have the luxury of observation, but the plants and animals are carried along in the seasonal surge. There is much that must be accomplished, and now is the time. To get closer to it, I head directly into the North Woods, climbing up the steep northeastern spur of the Great Hill, just west of the Meer. This is the part of the Park that most evokes a "real" forest. The Ramble, the other heavily wooded area, is more landscaped and picturesque, with its tightly winding paths. The North Woods is broader, more open. I climb the spur up to a trail that runs along the morning side of the Hill, where one can look both up into treetops, and down onto treetops.
It's the upper treetops that take the first sun. It rises from behind the city, silhouetting sharp angles, banning blind darkness with revelatory light. Working its way through tiny new leaves, among the flowering tips of Oaks, the sunlight discovers birds, first heard, now seen, intersecting May's first morning.
Finally, the whole slope is flooded with fresh daylight. Countless little leaves have appeared, on trees and brush, filling vacant spaces, filtering earth and sky through a glowing green reticulum. I pass along the dappled, Thrush infested hillside, reaching a small plateau that overlooks a steep descent into the depths of the Ravine.
Here is a place between. Poised above the sleeping valley, below the towering Oaks that climb the Hill behind me, I look out through the crowns of trees, onto the city far distant. At least it seems far, framed in foliage, like another country glimpsed in a dream. In fact, it’s never more than a quarter mile away, depending, of course, on which path you choose...
I turn away, heading downhill, into the dimness still lingering below.
Heliotropic flowers seek the sun, turning ever towards its rays. I move ahead to wait for it. Prolonging the morning, I precede the probing beams down the steep trail, to the bottom of the Ravine, where flows the Loch. The place-names in the Park are of two sorts. Some, like the Loch and the Ravine, go back to its creation, and indicate something of the designers' romanticized conception. Others have come from practical necessity, assigned by birders and others who need to say with some specificity just where something is. Hence we have Mugger’s Wood and the Maintenance Meadow, or the optimistically named Warbler Rock, to go along with such as the Ramble and the Sheep Meadow (long bereft of sheep). The Loch was once more of a lake, but it has silted into a shifting stream course, interspersed with islets which provide prime habitat for the migrant birds. The Ravine is really just the side of the Great Hill to the north and west of the Loch, with a much gentler slope on the east bank, where the margins of the North Woods give way to the Wildflower Meadow.
Over this eastern slope flows the morning sun, once it has cleared the city skyline. Lying as low as it does, the valley of the Loch is one of the few places in the Park where the bordering buildings cannot be seen. Not without some effort anyway, now that the leaves are coming out, delimiting the view. And on a morning such as this, you may escape, at least for a little while, the noises of the metropolis, which travel where vision cannot. The sirens of the city are not forgot, but here their call is easily ignored. Now the sunlight lies upon the Meadow, and leaks through budding Locust branches, backlighting Ash and Maple leaves, falling on Viburnum flowers.
At the bottom of the slope, the Loch creates a sort of tunnel, snaking through the trees. Trees arch above, and spread beyond, and ripple in reflections that seem to echo in the sound of flowing waters. The Spring-light penetrates, then permeates, the space, dancing across myriad leaves; rafts of green, that come as close as green can come to the color of sunlight. Some of the new-sprung foliage is so yellow as to recall Autumn, but this is not the time of decline. Everything is inhalation and exaltation, a gentle breeze like the Breath of Life, quivering among the leaves, flickering with birds, rippling like the stream that flows below, underneath the living, growing, canopy.
Here I pause a long while, lost in things green. At the center of the serpent; every tree a Tree of Knowledge. And this a morning unfallen. Yet morning falls by rising, and the climbing Sun finds me, lost to time, but still confined by it. I pass the better part of the morning along the Loch, and all my looking outward turns back on me, looking inward, with the time-lost gaze of reverie.
Morning is over. Most of the day remains, but it’s never quite the same. Not in May, in the Morning of the Year. All the things undone, or done badly, are still potentials of the morning, but now I must go and do them, for the Sun has overtaken me.
I will go on, of course, east to the Mount, and the Conservatory Garden below, electric with Tulips. On to the heights along the south shore of the Meer, till I’ve almost returned to where I started. Then it’s back into the Woods, but by a different path, looping around the north face of the Hill, and back to a high trail near the top, through a brushy sector full of low and viney growth. Here there are already signs of habitation. Once the weather warms, a few unmoored souls always find refuge in the Park, to varying degrees of tolerance. They range from amiable to menacing, and their presence has been known to surprise a binocular or two. Skirting the campsite, I descend the Hill, once and for all, reaching the Pool.
The Pool, perhaps the most intimate of the waters in the Park, is the source of the Loch, which flows from a waterfall at its east end. In reaching the head of the Loch, I have pretty much covered the north end of the Park. Below this point, one must go either east or west, as the central terrain is occupied by athletic fields, tennis courts, and then the vastness of the Reservoir, the largest open space in Manhattan.
Here our paths will part. By now, the afternoon is drawing on, and I’d advise you to head downtown. Survey the Reservoir; the Great Lawn; bird around the Ramble; stroll the Mall of Elms. You’ll find the sunset somewhere at the south end. That’s what I often do, and it’s plenty for any day of the year. But on a day in May, I may turn back, and wander once more where the morning was. A different scene, now seen by westering light. The color of the sinking sun is ever deeper than the morning, tinctured with its foreclosed possibilities. One of these, a day in the prime of Spring, is gone. Too few, the days of May pass too soon.
May 13, 2001
Mother’s Day
MotherNature
Mother
Earth
Mother may I
place in order
all things
always
Mother first
I treasure my mother,
not the more so for having lost my father, (though the implication is surely felt,) but because she upholds the place of honor custom, and our hearts, assign her.
The site of Origin is always Holy.
She is the beginning of my World.
I am the issue of hers,
and only an imitator, seeking to gain some semblance of her wisdom, of her understanding, of her grace. I know it is customary for children to think their parents the epitome; the wisest of beings, but in the case of my mother, I have yet to be convinced otherwise. Everything I feel, and write, and do, flows from a stream she thought, and spoke, and read,
to me,
just to me,
in the beginning.
I derive from her mind, as much as from her body.
Her melancholy, and her joy, inform me, along with her habit of seeing more in things than what the surface shows. From her I learned that every point is the starting place, the entry point, into an interconnected world of poetry and history that’s wound around the meanest of facts. Such was the story she told to me at bedtime, merging with slumber, dreamed into my being. Still I hold the tale before me, the glass I view through, as I cast my eye upon the Park, and all of Life outside its gates.
Outside the gates.
If Adam and Eve had had a mother, I imagine we’d still be living in the Garden.
There are two ways back there:
tear down the gates,
or make this place into that one.
They amount to the same thing.
If we cannot find the Gates of Paradise locally, we’ll do best to try improving what we have here, and make our World presentable, the kind of place you wouldn’t be ashamed to have your Mother visit.
May 01, 2001
Branching In
I’m not given to hyperbole, or maybe I am, but this day had to be the best one ever.At least it seemed that way, which is just as good.
And that’s the message of May Day: that this time around is the time, no matter the pattern. Something lives in the breath of a May morning; something ignorant of Tradition, or the Future; something that falls between them: the ecstatic moment; the site where Life is truly lived.
I chose to live this day, rather than write it. That will come, but just now I’m overcome, lost in abundance. Who could choose but one branch to bring back? Have the whole forest then, for these are the branches of May.
May 01, 2001