What season is today?

One of the differences between nature and people is that nature lets actions speak for themselves and people spend lots of time and energy naming and defining what it is they think they're doing and why. Despite having a degree in English and having had both essays and poems published, at the moment I'm leaning heavily toward nature's approach. Perhaps I'm even coming to understand more about Zen and  Taoism.

Part of the issue it seems to me is the tendency for humans to be legalistic more than ethical in our approach to what's right or wrong. We all too often confuse or conflate what's legal with what's just or moral. We're seeing examples of that these days as Congress passes legislation that reduces the pandemic's impact on millionaires and large corporations more than helping ordinary folks and Main Street businesses. That may be be legal because Congress made it so, but Congress can't make it fair or just or right.

a too typical April sky

Photo by J. Harrington

I spent much of the day comparing the definitions of agroecology and regenerative agriculture and permaculture. I'm not sure  how much, if any, the differences among them may make. My lawyer friends sometimes talk about a distinction without a difference. Shakespeare asks us:

“What's in a name? that which we call a rose
  By any other name would smell as sweet.”

And yet, in Genesis, man was given the power and responsibility of naming "every living creature."

Currently, we're in the midst of April, of Spring. It's snowing, again! I doubt the temperature will get above freezing. How can it be April and Spring and snowing and freezing. Have we misnamed the month or the season?

April

By Alicia Ostriker

The optimists among us

taking heart because it is spring

skip along

attending their meetings

signing their e-mail petitions

marching with their satiric signs

singing their we shall overcome songs

posting their pungent twitters and blogs

believing in a better world

for no good reason

I envy them

said the old woman

The seasons go round they

go round and around

said the tulip

dancing among her friends

in their brown bed in the sun

in the April breeze

under a maple canopy

that was also dancing

only with greater motions

casting greater shadows

and the grass

hardly stirring

What a concerto

of good stinks said the dog

trotting along Riverside Drive

in the early spring afternoon

sniffing this way and that

how gratifying the cellos of the river

the tubas of the traffic

the trombones

of the leafing elms with the legato

of my rivals’ piss at their feet

and the leftover meat and grease

singing along in all the wastebaskets

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