Seasons Within

The death of spring goes unnoticed yet we celebrate its birth as the vernal equinox. Maybe because the summer solstice, June 20^th this year, is always there to keep the cycle going. 

Spring in the Santa Monica Mountains was a meeting of lugubrious fog and a frolic of wild mustard as if to match the clash of the morning's breaking news and the painted hillside. The fog lifted as we drove through Latigo Canyon like a curtain going up on yellow and orange (blazing star) patches. Van Gogh gone mad with his palette. 

Keats wrote of spring as lustful and summer as a time to dream in creative lassitude, undisturbed in what Yeats might have described as the bee-loud glade. No argument from me though I reserve the right to lust for life as I see fit and a good night’s sleep is one of those inalienable rights I claim, even if it requires a little help from my friends as prescribed. If my new mattress doesn’t grant me six or seven hours of easeful sleep I’ll be ready to try that bee-loud glade. 

The poet wrote of early autumn belonging to Dionysius still swollen with summer and the juice of the vine. By mid-autumn I look for a bit of New Hampshire foliage in the glory of decay from ruddy to rust. See maples and die.

The passage from one to the other is hardly felt here where we barely have seasons at all. September in Southern California defies the calendar. Ho-hum, morning clouds giving way to afternoon sun with lows in the mid-sixties and a high of 73. No relief in sight.

With global warming, however, some plants are lurching ahead of the starter’s pistol. Migratory birds are being denied their habitats and whales are making U-turns. 

To some extent our bodies yearn for their own seasons, their cycles. In these shadowed times it seems to me we need to turn toward the light the same way branches contort to benefit their leaves. Call it an instance of human tropism. We are just another exotic organism in the garden, desperate for a sliver of sun.

Whether this will be our winter of discontent shall be determined on Nov. 5^th.  The vote will be a plebiscite in the turbulence of sense or no-sense for the American people. Are we so parched as to choose toxic water? So blind to the serpent in the garden? So entranced by hollow promises and barbed rhetoric? Are we in the grip of a constitutional eclipse or will we vote aligned with our flowering, in accord with the enlightenment of our Founders?