Eternal Hope
This sprouting Pink purslane (Portulaca pilosa) has made its home at the edges of the sacred Hammock growing here on our campus. This place is full of life and persistence. A summer of rainfall after the long draught brought up seeds that had waited a seeming eternity for the life spark, for the holy water to switch their processes on and send roots into the well-drained soil and send cells skyward. The Portulaca loves the climate. It's succulent leaves grow fat wet cells that cherish the rain waters and hold them close even when the summer fades to fall and rainstorms come less frequently if at all. It's iron rich fiber is a tribute to its strength, delicate yet sturdy, delicious on a summer salad and delightful to observe. This sprout may be a few weeks old, if that. They branch and spread at their base as they grow, sprouting shining flowers, purple and eye-catching, tempting us to remember that life does not care if the landscape is comprised of but a heap of sand or the rich loam of the prairie, where seeds drop and rains fall and sun shines, life can be found. Where energy enough to set the cells in motion has been established, something lives. This flower will go to seed next week or the week after that and store the same knowledge and hope and it will drift outward away from the base and wait for another summer's season to roll through. The floor of the Hammock is covered with these plants. Annual ground herbs, first stage succession, the promise of life and the beginning of a long cycle of change that will one day have this earth say Oak and Palm, where it merely says purslane and crabgrass now. The plant is nothing without the ground in which to root its fibers, and nothing without the rain with which to fill its cells, and nothing without the sun with which to energize it growth, but with all of these it is its own statement and presence and beauty. A beauty that has come to have some call this species "Kiss me quick" to which my eyes have always abided. So much history in a single stalk. Eternity in a bloom.

More knowledge here than in all the planners in Washington. More foresight and trial and error. We would serve oursleves well to notice the foolish ways in which our own extracted consciousness has ridden itself into a dilemma. Power has come to stand in for intelligence, force for right, ignorance for truth. Thoreau once wrote that "just as a snowdrift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up." The lulls have been long and yawning. Whether change or not will come is not a question that the polls will answer. Only you.

Exotic Lament
This majestic eucalyptus tree (Myrtaceae eucalyptus) catches the setting sunlight in the back corner of my lot here on this heap of sand welded onto the North American continent so many eons ago. The tree sometimes seems as if it has been there since that time; its girth almost twenty feet and it towers above every other living thing in my neighborhood. Eucalyptus are not native to Florida, they evolved on the continent of Australia, and are unique to that island nation. But their beauty, the white woods exposed beneath a pealing rolling bark, the scythe-like leaves, drooping with authority, and the star-patterned flower clusters all attract themselves to the human imagination. We have dispersed it to our living places everywhere. In Southern California, where the eucalyptus finds a climate much like its home climate in Australia, the tree has become something of a nuisance, so loving the warm dry air of the region that it reproduces beyond its wildest dreams and does so with such fervor that other forms of life get pushed aside. Its seeds seem to sprout on every piece of ground they reach and they grow with such speed that one cannot blink an eye lest they become invaded by the plant. We are luckier here in Florida where the trees will do just fine but cannot take root from their own seed in the sandy ground. I do not know yet why, but I do know it is a truth. In our plam hammock on campus, there are four eucalyptus trees planted in the late 1960s who are not even close to the size of this one but who grow flowers every year and seem to drop some seed, but have not succeeded in spawning progeny. The curving scythe-like leaves are reproduced in the curving armlike branches, the tree fills space and shades yard, and sheds bark and leaves and has what can only described as a presence. I would welcome it under any circumstances and worry not one lick about its staus as an exotic, a moniker that sends shivers and tremors through the nerves of some purists I know. To be from elsewhere is a dangerous thing; to be unusual or unlike is akin to criminal behavior. Purity is desired, the true landscape, an ecology untouched by humans, unblemished by the acts of human will. I do not have to play this out very far to expose its shallow roots and wilting leaves. We do not do well to condemn that which lives and only serve to do what death does by doing so. Ideals are forged in the cauldron of imagination, which, when unstudied, comes to badly built conclusions. Know thy metaphors, and rethink thy place.

The erstwhile architect of our failed disaster in Iraq and current tenuous head of the World Bank is one whose metaphors have gone all wrong. The diminutive and gargoyle-like demon has through the force of his own ill-conceived will over these past six years led us toward more dead ends and bad situations than the King of England ever even threatened and still the sensibility of the other powers cannot quite push him from his heights. The forces of good are not at play in this nation any longer, if ever. The forces of humanity have retreated while evil men with small minds and only selfish goals feed at the public trough and steal from our best intentions. All the while, those of us who do nothing, who choose our own self interest only serve these powers. We do not live isolated lives, we merely cultivate isolated imaginations. We have been cloistered by technology and decception into our own self-defeating units of non-power, non-will. The traditional family is such a lust word for the powers that be because it forces us into units that cannot hope to contend with such power. We are no longer public or social or collective or guided by our better instincts because our better instincts are denied us in our boxes and refused us by the market, and squelched and laughed at and turned sour by experience. Paul Wolfowitz, under a reasonable government operating according to long-accepted principles of justice, would have been jailed long ago. Our president, too. Crimes are crimes and they should be punished, but we are too much distracted by our own petty lives and the stuff we think we need to fill them with. The violence perpetrated on us is generational now, it numbs us to truth and shields us from even ourselves. Antoni Gramsci called it hegemony, where the social group of capitalists, those who own and control capital in this deceptive system we have been sold, rule over the rest of us with an iron fisted reality that denies us our birthright. Go ye to your dungeons and caves, invest thyselves with nothingness and aspire to the empty status of consumptive beings. Be what you are through what you own, know who you are by what others say of you, lose yourselves in the lie, for the alternative would take more imagination than we have cultivated in this nation of ours. Live the dying lifestyle and do not ask why, you have been well trained. Do not, whatever you do, aspire to live a life as present as the majestic eucaplytus, branching to your true nature, filling out a girth worthy of titans; that would be sneered at by your neighbors and upset the Walmart stockholders. Go ye! The time is ripe for self-defeat.

Plant burst
The pepper grass (Lepidium latifolium) exploded like a green bush firework after the heavy rains that fell in early April. The plants is known as poor man's pepper for its mustard garlic tasting seeds and is said to be high in vitamin C. It is a member of the mustard family, but because of reasons lost to history, this one and its common species grows as a weed in disturbed landscapes and empty lots. Reports of its presence are found from Virginia to Florida and west to the Colorado Rockies. It can be eaten by people, but mostly isn't. Instead it propogates itself with the help of wildlife and winds, and its own strategy of producing a sunburst of seeds. This one caught the morning light in the Palm Hammock as I made my rounds one morning last week. Something about the multiple layers of leaves and flowers growing up out of the multitude of stems gave it a wonderful, light, and attractive appearance. I could not take my eyes from it and I pondered the pure beauty that it presented. These plants have grown early in the season down here on this heap of sand called Florida, this is but one of perhaps several hundred that dot the Palm Hammock right now, having begun their life during the rains of January and persistently grown on through a long draught. The pepper grasses I remember from last season, which no doubt parented this one here and the many others, were not so full and robust, but presented themselves in a taller thinner form. This one tickled my imagination, did it look like thought as it bursts in the mind? Can nature offer anything but delight? Does it remind me of the complexity of what one might call engineering lurking in the cells of every living thing, the history of persistence and tenacity, the dogged pursuit of living that spawned our own kind? Can one embrace a form with one's eyes? Can a form speak to us? This pepper grass in its spark of life gave my morning a completeness that the grandest cathedral in the world would not have achieved. We must notice these moments. Relish them. Cultivate.

How much nature and living and life was lost on the poor angry soul who took so many lives in Virginia last week. I watched with the same horror as everyone as the numbers rolled in and the facts came pouring out over every web site and news cast, the buzz began to tumble over itself like a verbal avalanche and before long it was no longer about what it was about, but about itself only and people nowhere near the events and no sense of history. I watched as television news became more concerned with its own navel and I watched American culture as its sick discompassion pretended to care, and cared not a whit. A culture without true humanity can make no sense of human frailty. Death and a massacre become cause for fake compassion, false love, pretend concern, all of which is just an expression of the true emotional confusion that comprises our collective existence. Those poor children and professors. Yes. And I wish help and healing and some means to make sense of the losses to the families. But I am ashamed at the official response. I am ashamed that it makes the authorities decide their mistake was not enough policing, not enough threats of violence. They police just fine, thank you. Too much, one might say. Violence is the only answer, so then why would a lost soul not turn to what his own authorities propose? A little more health care, a little more compassion, and a true sensitivity to the rhythms and needs of human culture is what could have avoided this tragedy. This was not one lost soul, unexplainable but as an anomaly, this was us, and our lives and our lifestyles and our selfishness and our callousness and our desire for riches and competition and lust for material coming home to roost. When all you can see are potential advantages, you take advantage. More sensitive souls are destroyed in the process. He said as much. You have destroyed me. He was not lying and even after his desperate act trying to show us something we should have seen without so much carnage, nary a person could listen; an ironic question mark at the end of a bad day, proving, in the end, that his futile desperation was well cultivated. We are not living the joyous existence made possible by the fact of living here on this planet; we are barbarians, not the murderous boy, but the culture who made him. The symptoms are everywhere, and yet we remain deaf and blind and insensitive to them. I wish for an end to these obstacles. May a new worldview explode in our imaginations, growing like the branches of a pepper grass plant after an April rain, catching the morning light, beginning your day on a true path, and aiming toward delight.

Life, Live
On a chosen stretch of ground in the sacred palm hammock natural area adjacent to the main campus, where we removed by hand labor a thicket of Brazilian pepper (Schinus terebinthifolius) ten years old, and were told the ground would be left barren and steril, this live oak (Quercus virginiana) has sprouted to defy the dour predictions of our nay-saying leaders. Live oak, living oak, life. The live oak does not lose its leaves in the fall like its cousins to the north. The leaves grow thick and dark green, the better to ward off the powerful rays of summer sun, thick almost succulent, rounded rather than the usual lobed oak shape, and curved slightly under, to protect the lighter colored underside from harsh reflected light. They only lose the last generation, a browning tumbling mass, when the new one is in place, in mid-March. Mature, the live oak towers and spreads across an expanse of space the size of a small home. Its arm-like branches, thick as an iron-worker's bicep, its spreading trunk, cupped almost like a human hand. The live oak, when allowed to grow into maturity, creates a welcoming space, a place reminscent of our deepest pastoral dreams, peaceful, shaded, cool, open. But that is future. Today, these three leaves represent hope. Other eyes, perhaps, would not even have noticed their presence, or perhaps would have confused them with some other plant, or trammeled this sprout with their eyes cast horizontal, not even knowing what marvelous miracle had just fallen crushed under their feet. When I noticed this sprout last week, I was moved almost to tears, overjoyed at the fact that this little piece of earth would say oak, where I had labored to open it up several months before. We are taught in these modernist days to ignore all the signs and only watch the bottom line, to treat each phenomenon as randomly unconnected to the others, to ignore superstition and laugh at belief and only trust in that which can be measured. We are lost these days, unable to notice the joy that a sprouting oak represents. This great conspiracy of ignorance, casting itself as cold hard reason, denies us our birth right and removes us from knowing the real things to be known. Our lives do matter, every step makes a difference, our purpose here is to live a life as life was made to be lived. This oak promises me the hope that such a path is a righteous one. It promises that the future is brighter than the present, that we can wish for better days and work toward them steadily. This little oak, this expression of earth and air and water and soil and seed, has proven something that all of the science in the world will never disprove. This oak is the earth saying thank you, and I will nurture its growth to say, you are quite welcome.

And still the charade unfolds in our nation's capitol; lying men and only half-lying opponents battle out a future that none of us would choose. Who among us has sent young people to their death? Who among us would manufacture weapons designed to tear through flesh with an efficieny that defines evil? Who among us has cultivated hate and distrust and an unwillingness to see all life as worthy of living? Who perpetuates the hierarchy or believes in leadership as necessary? Who profits from the death of others, and robs and cheats and steals so that their barricades can be built higher and their walls made thicker and their world more insular? What has happened to the great project of humanity? Why have we conceded to the forces of death? What is this wish for instability and violence other than a last gasp by desperate men whose time has finally come? The wise words of Henry Thoreau are useful to us now in these dark days of ongoing deception. We must not fight the market and its lying minions, we must transcend it. "Cultivate poverty like a garden herb. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Thing do not change; we change." And so pursue that sprouting oak, find the earth again telling you what is right and true and why there is hope for the future after all. Do not concede another inch. Sprout in the soils they have told you are poisoned and flourish for the sake of us all.

Ground cover
This beautiful yellow flower, the bloom of the narrow leafed ground cherry (Physalis angustifolia), is not usually viewed from an angle that reveals the delicate purple interior. It hangs down to the ground, like a bell, hiding its pistil and stamen from larger creatures like ourselves. But its bloom must be found, for it spreads with a steady patience across the edge zone between trimmed landscape and wild hammock, amongst other weedy grasses and invasive herbs. It appears from above to have built a flower too big for its stalk, but its success does not indicate that there is any mistake here, that cells should have been smaller in one place and larger in another. One pauses and takes the delicate bloom in their hand and gently turns it skyward and sees the patterns made inside, some code for ground ants or flying insects, who seem to always find the stopping point and fertilize the plant. This angle from the ground itself, the view from an ant plain, as it were, reveals the inside of this bloom and behind it the chinese lantern-like pod that accrues when the flower has been pollinated, waiting patiently with seed protected inside its own weather balloon. When this annual stalk falls to the ground, or extends it stalk long enough to pull itself over, a new generation will be planted. It is called a rhizome, but I suspect that the structure of its body and seed pods only make it appear as such. That the new sprouting apparent at its joints are not roots from the same, but the result of these delicate seed pods' natural reaction to the self planting taking place. This is the season of ground cherry blooming, the first of the year, to be followed by another mid-fall - the season of beauty facing downward and life sprouting up. Their charming attactive appearance bothers no one, and so they do not get classified as weeds, though they are most definitely a disturbed land species. They are out in abundance this week.

And I think back to the way in which war and violence and power and lies are tossed about and reinforced and played like an old victrola upon our otherwise sensitive consciousness. Our abstract world, our abstracted selves, not really living, barely even thinking any more. These electronic codes, having nothing at all to do with the ant plain or the smell of the air outside today or the movement of our bowels or the rhythm of what is called life. We embrace the images of lies, the stylistic falsity of reflective self-congratulation. We do not want to want to be enamoured of these constructions and yet we are, persistently. You there, reading this here, these words, a stream out of this consciousness sitting next to a device whose presence seems remarkable and yet has caused even more abstraction, and thus is not leaving a mark at all. The written word is the choicest of relics, but the means that you get to it counts. A flat screen lit from behind has all the ethical qualities of murder, in fact. Or maybe, manslaughter, for your intentions are not evil, and your goals are not bad, it is merely the outcomes. But, and I plead for attention to this point, those outcomes can only result from your own practiced inattention. Inattention to the place where you are, always. Inattention to the subtle connection, the human labor and suffering and the life trying to be lived out just past the margin of your awareness. Let today be an awake day. Let our murderous past be a lesson. Let our own conscience and not our ego and not our greed and not the shallow toss-away reasoning of the abstract market society, our own conscience, our best guide. Do listen. It knows. It can view the world from the ant's plain and see the delicate interior and understand the higher truths that our flippant desires for nothingness force us to overlook. I pray for your strength in this pursuit. And for the salvaging of your inner life. I pray for peace, as only it can be manifest - the delicate purple patterns painted inside the narrow leafed ground cherry on a warm Saturday afternoon.

Elegant Weed
This dogfennel (Eupatorium capillifolium) sprout is only a few weeks old and it has taken on the form of a miniature white pine (Pinus strobus) as they grow at the edges of pastures in New England when they are given ample time. It came up after the late December rains and if it is not cut down by the landscaping crew it will grow to six or eight feet in height before 2007 is out. By then, its similarity to pine will be long gone. It's parent stock stands in its last stages of decline on the interior of the palm hammock next to where this sprout took hold. Last fall, the forest of full-grown dogfennel waved gently in the wind and its thin leaves gave a soft fluffy green appearance and a soft feel against the skin when one wandered the former access road that used to cut through the campus nature area. In late october, the light green turned more burgundy and over time pollination must have taken place because by December, the soft ends of these not quite auburn leaves released fluffy strands of seed parachutes, carrying the next generation of this annual sprouter to all corners of the palm hammock. Those fall breezes must have carried a seed right to this spot here in a bare patch of sand amongst failing exotic turf and growing vines, beneath a struggling live oak who will one day make us proud. It may have sprouted before the December rains, but not much. The fall presented most of the plant life here with a dearth of rain, a drought, a drying up under persistant and hot sunshine. But this one made it thus far and now awaits the choices of grounds crew and the timing of rain in the months ahead. Dogfennel is considered an invasive weed because it interferes with fine manicured lawns and it invades agricultural plots (it does love disturbed soil) and generally gets in the way of people trying to use the land for the purpose of generating cash. I like it for these very same reasons and for the reason that it is beautiful and persistent and in its adulthood lovely in its many phases. It holds soil in place and towers over the sandy ground, maintaining a ground-level coolness not otherwise available in the hot Florida seasons. It helps more than it hurts in most cases, sheltering cabbage palm (Sabal Palmetto) sprouts and nurturing grasses. We dislike it because we are mistaken.

But, then, we are a mistaken culture. Brute force, and a blinding self-confidence, which manifest as a brutal ignorance of others, has come to define the essence of who we are anymore. We wave our flags and cheer as the dictators are savagely needlessly hung, self-assured about the justice of this. And then the numbers become public. We have overseen the deaths of 36,000 Iraqi's during the past bloody year of warfare in Iraq. Another 36,000 maimed and injured to carry with them for their lives, if such are possible in the territory we have ruined these past four years. We fight wars against lovely, soft hearted, delicate plants like the dogfennel and lovely kind hearted people like the Iraqis because our wallets and our bank accounts and all the things we think are measurements of our worth, must be protected and defended and bolstered and grown. We have made murder stand in for virtue, violence for progress, and hate for compassion. Not wealth at all, but that other thing, more wretched, more shameful. Turn your eyes one half turn and you will see. This is not what we want, this is not what we want to be, these are no longer our leaders, this is no longer a viable path for a sustainable future. If this is wealth, I beg for poverty. To steal from Thoreau again, "Give me the poverty that knows true wealth." Enough of this foolishness.