"Pullin' weeds and pickin' stones..."

Last week, after one week's delay, we had a work day in the brazilian pepper removal site. A dozen Eckerd College students got up by 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, despite late night Roman celebrations that many had attended, and used loppers and hand saws and shoulders and backs to cut and pile the brazilian pepper trees (Schinus terebinthifolius) that had once covered the entire peninsula section of the Palm Hammock. This project has had college students slowly saw and lop through stand of about three acres of trees, much of which is now covered in dog fennel (Eupatorium capillifolium) and dangle pod or is sprouting a sea myrtle (Baccharis halimifolia) and baby live oak (Quercus virginiana) forest.

Saturday, the students worked primarily on removing the tops, cutting the trunks and branches into straight pieces and piling them in between the palm trees trees you see in the bottom photograph. We also dug two or three big stumps. I am hoping the pile, which students were careful to make parallel and pack down as tightly as they could, will prevent the brazilian pepper sprouts that were coming up between these trees from growing. I have decided to allow the sprouts that are littered throughout last spring's clearing areas grow. There are more than any of us could get in one sweep, and they are not now large enough to pull from a standing position. I will wait until they have grown enough to be seen, and then we'll make a day of it. By the end of the shift, the remaning students were ready for a cooling shower and perhaps an afternoon in the beach side hammock. "We are made of dreams and bones."

Thanks to Stephen, Kathryn, Philip, Veronika, Noah, Rosie, Robin, Walker, Elise, Taylor, and Margie for all your hard work!

Itchy

The week passed with only a few passing rains. The pond in the middle of the clearing is slowly retreating into the bowl that it fills, leaving a layers of duck weed (the tenacious Lemnaoideae Family of floating plants) to suffocate upon dry ground. They perish and slowly decompose where water once floated them leaving a brownish, yellowish ring around the pond, which you can see if you click on the photo and then magnify it. The green that you see through the weeds are those plants covering the surface. The frogs also continue to inhabit the edges and the surface of the pond. I noted that they seemed to swim beneath the surface as well. This is the first year I have seen them in four years of observation. I took a careful look at the ground in the areas we cleared last winter and spring. We spread a lot of new Brazilian pepper (Schinus terebithifolius) seed around that area by mistake and we will be pulling new sprouts out of there for years, I believe. The pepper sprouts seem to be able to hold on even beneath a tall overstory of dog fennel and sedge. I see them sitting there, waiting for the opportunity. Pushing down roots, building up energy. We will try to find these this fall and pull them. The plants grew fast with the rains a few weeks ago, but now everything is over extended and where it can, plants turn to flower and seed converting the last advantages into next year's crop before the present generation passes on. This stage is an itchy stage from the perspective of a being with skin. Powdery whisps and drying extensions, everything a little sharper and more brittle. It tickles at the nose, teasing a sneeze or into the lungs erupting as a cough or into the side of an ankle where sand spur tines puncture down to the fibula sending shock waves back up the spine. Fall hides in the landscape in subtropical Florida, luring the unaware into dangerous circumstances. The common rag weed flower (Ambrosia artemisiifolia) [in the photo above] can be seen everywhere. This ubiquitous plant has done well in the palm hammock this season. There are towering plants in some places over six feet tall. All of them now sport these compact flower/seed pods. Bright green. In the farthest reaches of our clearing, to the west, I also happened upon this delightful splash of color, a blooming Lantana plant (Lantana camara), [in the photo to the left] which has volunteered from elsewhere in the Hammock. This farthest section has taken on the most variety of pioneers after clearing as any of the sections cleared so far. It is closer to the development across the pond. And it is the most recent fill location in the whole natural area. The earth, though squishy in places, felt mostly firm beneath my feet.

Fall

Of the many things that one needs to get used to having transported from the 42nd parallel to the 28th is the inversion of seasons. Summer means dormancy. Fall means new-growth. This week the dangle pods seemed to have doubled in size. So much so that I could not get my photo panaroma maker to make a decent panorama out of my photos. Instead, I will begin with this image of the eucalyptus tree that centers the plot we have been clearing. Two years ago, the tree was surrounded by Brazilian pepper. Now it stands nearly free amongst a field of dog fennel, bushy bluestem, and sedge. The dangle pod growth heralds the growth that has renewed everywhere. Oaks are sprouting the maroon baby leaves we see two or three times a year and the palms are pushing out new fronds and their soon to be flowering effervescence. When I made my way across the clearing today, I notice dozens of small frogs that have come to populate the small pond that centers the area. The pond itself has been infested with duck weed as long as we have been working here, but it has been mostly dead as a result, since the duck weed prevents decomposition underwater and makes the water anoxic. These frogs seems to have adapted an ability to rest atop the duck weed and use the pond as a wide open surface on which they hunt insects. They all apear to have been born in the past few weeks. While there is lots of new greenery everywhere, the flowers are still waiting even cooler weather. There are a few new bloomers, though. Like these white ones which I have not seen before in the Hammock. It is growing in three places right now. It grew in no places last year. The final shot is the understory of the dangle pod forest.

Verdant

The changes over a week are far more subtle than over several. This week has been especially rainy, so the plants have in fact taken on quite a bit more size, especially the dangle-pod. They are fast growing annuals and have outpaced the dog fennel. [You can click on the photo for a closer look.] On the west side of the pond the swamp flatsedge (Cyperus ligularis) that were killed in the January frost are recovering, slowly. It will take some time for them to repopulate, if there is even space for them. The bushy bluestem (Andropogon glomeratus), which has made a regular home in the meadow, is growing to monumental proportions after the rains, with grass leaves towering six and half feet into the air before the first suggestions of the tufts that will come begin to show. Mostly, it is green everywhere. If you lean in close, however, you can see the dangle-pods beginning to flower. This pale yellow blossoms will metamorphose into a long dry dangling bean pod by October. The red flower is called a tasselflower (Emilia fosbergii) and it grows at the edges of the Palm Hammock, far from the re-growing restoration site. But they are so striking against the general green of everything else, I could not refrain from taking their picture. The ground was mushy everywhere from the rains.

Yellowish

The whole pond region has transformed since my last visit in mid-July. Two weeks of fairly regular rains and no human visitors and the dangle-pod (Sesbania herbacea) has colonized in among the dog-fennel (Eupatorium capillifolium) and a new growth of grasses and sedge seem to be filling in the empty spaces. The far west region of the clearing has the same appearance as the other parts we have cleared -- sprouting dog fennel and dangle weed, yellow-nut sedge (Cyperus esculentus), purslane and pusley crawling along the ground building succulent leaves -- but when you kneel down and look closer to the ground you can see the mistakes we made last winter. In a regrettable act of hubris, no efforts were made to contain the red Brasilian pepper seeds, and the cold weather seems to have incubated them well. Brazilian pepper sprouts (Schinus terebinthifolius) are everywhere. Our first task this fall will be to remove them.

Overall, the area has taken on the quiet beauty of late summer Florida. Beach sunflowers have covered a pile of sticks, opening their smiley yellow faces to the hot summer sun. Similarly, dozens upon dozens of this golden yellow aster (Pityopsis gaminifolia) are blooming across the Palm Hammock Nature Area, lending subtle highlights to the landscape's sun-baked green appearance. Fall, our growing season, will be upon us soon.

July 19, 2010

It has rained again this week some after a long stretch without. It has been a dry summer. [click on the photo for a larger view] Dog fennel has returned, but not with the same robust density as last season. All of the sedge on the left side perished in the freeze this past January, which has transformed the growth patterns there as the thick dead grass remains undecomposed and acts as a sort of mulch, preventing sunlight from reaching soil. Several myrtle trees have sprung up and grown with vigor. Two live oaks. Still no palms. It is partly cloudy and very muggy. Today this flower blooms all over Seth's Meadow.

Seth's Meadow

A mere two and a half years and a once shrub-covered plot becomes the tapestry of photosynthesis. These broom sedge (Andropogan glomeratus) florescence have come to make a statement, saying something about the tenacity of life and the principles of restoration. This meadow, named after the man who cleared it first, who had the vision, and who left behind a pile of woven branches so that we will always remember, is a tribute to to the beauty of wildness and the power of imagination. That lengthening May day back in 2007, the ignorance of how much we had left to do, and the aching muscles burning from the energy of pepper fiber and sandy earth. They were violent days at first, chopping and cutting and digging and pulling. The fire ants, you remember, taking advantage of the niche we had opened and feasting one too many times on the flesh of our own legs and backs and hands. Then came the swamp flatsedge (Cyperus ligularis) and dog fennel (Eupatorium capillifolium) to populate the newly opened space. Dayflowers (Commelina diffusa) and capeweed (Phyla nodiflora) did their part as well. The broom sedge is a latecomer, but a welcome one. Today in the sparkle of late fall sunshine the season of Florida spring peaked. Everywhere flowers began turning to seed and pollinators rushed to get their work complete before the cooling air would render them sluggish and weak.

We are often discouraged on this blazing heap of sand, numbed by oppressive sunshine and too much history. Two paces of life fill this over-sized village of ours. One has been dominant for some time now. A pace of regimentation, coordination, and efficiency. A pace that squeezes the last dollar out of the last second of every day, hedging bets on tomorrow and arranging an entire human habitat to serve these future needs. It is like the stand of Brazilian Pepper that once dominated this spot, so greedy for sunshine and so quick to adapt to every advantage that the result is a decline of diversity, a monocrop, monotheism, a spot of monopoly, a singular piece of land dedicated to the support of a single species of plant from which we derive few benefits. The problem of pepper as the problem of the large corporation is exactly the same: it is a problem of justice and equity. There is no question of might and ability, but action done against society without consent, as we well know, is just not acceptable.

That other pace of life, the other one you know - the one that stalls you on your way to work to steal another glance at a rising sun, or pulls you from your desk to propel you into places that stimulate your thoughts and stir your mind. That other pace is here, too. And rising, like these broom sedge florescence, to delight the palette of today.

Delicate origins, difficult seed
These are the flowers and early seed pods of the Florida buttonwood tree (Conocarpus erectus), a mangrove shrub native to this region. The eye-shaped leaves and alternating branches of both the traditional variety, of which this is one, and of the silver variety, which differs in tone, color, and texture, gives the overall form of the shrub a tree-like quality, tufts of growth pushing skyward. These plants are a favorite among Florida Friendly advocates, loved for their beauty and ease of care. These particular flowers and seeds will develop through the season and then some time late next fall will suddenly turn brown and begin to be eaten. We are told these seed pods will not germinate in this soil on their own. They are dependent upon an apparently co-evolved bird species through whose gut the seed must pass. Such birds are either few and far between any more or they do not pass the seeds in our vicinity, because I have almost always only seen this tree in places where people have put it already sprouted, present photo included. This does not detract from its beauty or its place, it merely explains its circumstances. Nevertheless, I plant the seeds every week or so in my restoration plot - so far, no takers. Perhaps I should experiment with the passage through my own gut?

It used to be to wail and howl at others, those unscrupulous pirates who robbed us blind almost since the 21st century began. And they have not all gone away. But they no longer have the access to national power that they had under the prior chief (I will not even name him). Now, I think, the battle is ours to lose. They don't want us to get our health care. No one wants to end the wars completely. It isn't a radical agenda in the White House. But it is the sort of inclusive centrism that inspires better days. That means that wailing and howling must now shift to us, to you and me. Not to point fingers, but to reflect. What have you done lately? What have I? Are we like the seed of the buttonwood tree, elegant and then hard. Resistant to our native soils. Dependent upon the consumption of others? These days are ours. We may wallow in our indignation or we may hasten into the change. I choose the latter, and will have the buttonwood seeds with my morning coffee.

Twisting fate
What is better might be the way that a native passion flower vine (Passiflora sumthinorutta) with juicy seeds spreads its generations so quickly. The corkscrew passion vine is what the native plant store called it. It had overtaken the rotting husk of a Brazilian Pepper bush that was zapped with herbicide. The pepper trunks lurk for years after such a treatment. Standing husks of starved fiber. This vine made its way up the long stem and then gathered at the top. It has been growing for more than a year or two, given its size, but only now, this week, I notice its presence. Nature is like that. Hiding things in plain view. Propagating prolifically, crowding the ground before you even know a seed has fallen. The offspring of this plant now pops up all around this area, under palm trees, amidst sprouting dog fennel, under towering oaks. It must be a delicious, or at least tempting, fruit. Under trees implies that birds like it. These fruit are not yet ripe, but I believe they will be before summer arrives. And more of the elegant vine will populate the Hammock.

We must always hope that politics are like that, too. Silent husks of dead or killed material covered quietly in a native vine. The opposite of problems hiding in plain site. It is nice to feel that someone is at the wheel and tellingly shameful how unwillingly the fear mongers depart. Yelling louder and louder as they become increasingly less relevant. These changes have promising futures, we look on them like the corkscrew vines, welcome members of our restoration community.

Palm Hammock Clearing, 4/18

This the work crew from Saturday the 18th of April. We made the green pile of brush you see in the distance and cleared a fairly good sized swath of land. A number of the trees that we cut down were covered in Virginia creeper, which we tried to save. Maxim and Noah helped.

Doik!
This juvenile raccoon had wandered down to the water at the edge of our clearing in the Palm Hammock to get a drink and dig for insects. He or she worked away in the mud for a few couple of minutes before noticing my watchful eye. The wind was against my face, so none of my human scent made it to the water's edge. The animal knew what I was, though, and looked only for this one second when I snapped the shutter, the next second it had dashed off through the sedge back into the safety of the growing forest. There is much wildlife activity at the clearings now. In the area to the west of the pond, coyote scat filled with rabbit hair. On the east side, in the thicket of sedge leaves and dog fennel husks, a family of marsh rabbits have taken root. They nibble on the undergrowth and stay clear of predators, as much as possible. Underneath the dried leaves of last year's swamp flatsedge sprouts of dog fennel and capeweed and ground cherry start their annual parade of growth. Up top, the landscape has opened as the dried stalks of dog fennel fade into dust. The new season is upon us, poking its calyx and tentative primary leaves up into the morning air. Last year's excesses still stand in our presence, too, reminders of the season past and the great potential always lurking.

Historic days in Washington. Big changes for our nation. We still seem, in our media, lodged in older days. We seem to have some difficulty, our media, with ending old habits and so they still give voice to those dying ideas, pretending all along that they did not bring us to this brink. We hear the noise, like last year's husks of dog fennel, still crowding our landscape, but slowly, inexorably fading to dust. Next year's cape weed is underway, the day flower(Commelina diffusa) is blooming next to my recovering oak. Obama has laid a new seedbed as well, cultivating next year's florescence. Time alone will show its health.

Two Airplane Events

It was a cool clear morning, we all remember - we all have been remem-bering for almost eight years. And I am not trying to desecrate or rhapsodize; I do not use these images to sensationalize. 

We followed its path that morning in our many different stations, the small plane became a jet.  The first jet was followed by a second. We stood riveted, what do we do? And in those horrible moments after the explosions we all lost something - the futility of the situation, bigger than life and yet putting so much life at stake. The despair coming from seeing the tragedy and being able to do nothing. And then those gut wrenching moments when one and then the other of the buildings pancaked into the ground leaving a void larger than the space they once filled. We all lost something that day, everyone one of us. Two airplanes taken from their pilots and turned into bombs. Two airplanes flying low across the city; how many New Yorkers gazed up to see one pass that morning or heard the strange buzz of engines too low to the ground and knew that something was amiss somewhere? They froze us in place. Watching. Unbelieving. Being acted upon.

And then, how many New Yorkers stood in place watching again last week as an airplane taken from its pilot, glided silent and low over the streets of New York, and into the Hudson River. As if a coda on the end of a trying and difficult era, in the days before we celebrate Martin Luther King and welcome into office Barack Obama, the most unlikely of Presidential candidates, the water landing of an Airbus in the Hudson River has given us new metaphors and useful tropes.  The airplane, taken from the pilot by the random presence of Canadian geese, inexplicably turned into a boat once it touched down in the river.  Our metaphors have been so dreary since that September day.  Now we have something new, something unmistakably transformative.  Experience and training, quick thinking under fire,

saving lives. We have photographs of people waiting to climb to safety.  Images of tragedy averted, of help arriving.  We have learned of the fear when the knowledge of a crash became clear in the airplane, and the panic that arose when the plane came to a stop.  We learned that people took care of each other.   We have images of perfect strangers holding each other on the slippery edges of wings that are sinking below icy water.  We see boats and companies with no fiduciary interest in this aircraft or these people rushing as fast as they can to the problem.  Let us help out, they said.  It was a moment of great humanity in all senses of the word.  It was the second airplane event, the other shoe falling, a tragic set of circumstances accompanied by a different set of human values, a fundamentally alternate outcome, the dawn of a new era. I know those who found themselves weeping as they watched the passengers get ferried safely to shore, as they read the stories of near death, the shouting in the cabin, the visceral fear as water streamed in around windows, I know they felt the same pent up sorrow that I felt; relief.   The recent past, these last eight years, were made all the more unnerving in contrast to the genuine compassion expressed that day.  

Such moments in their authenticity have a strong residue; in its historic and spatial placement, the saga of the water landing in New York last week concluded a drawn-out period of mourning.  The thing we had lost has returned. We can move again.  And act.

Towering Forest of Fennel

The whole transformational quality of it.  The changes every day and slow metamorphosis over the course of years.  This forest, these evergreen giants.  These are dog fennel (Eupatorium capillifolium ).  They have grown a full season in the soils that were populated with Brazilian Pepper alone when I began my time here at Eckerd.  They have grown, leafed the fluffy wispy leaves they grow, flowered, and died.  Only the uppermost branches still remain on these plants, the others have dried and turn to dust.  It is dusty these days in the Pam Hammock as thousands of last season's dog fennel turn to dust.  At their base, next seasons stalks begin to poke up through the soil like green slippers or a pool of seedlings.  

Or a grassroots president who seems to be paying attention.

Adaptability
This spurge whose delicate flowers erupt in tiny floresence from the stem of the parallel leaves covers ground where ground needs covering.  It is named in a dismissive manner because most would rather dismiss it.  But up close it is quite a sight to behold.  This one is spitting out flowerettes almost faster than I can photograph them.  It doesn't have the purple coloration that other varieties in the region have.  It covers abandoned lawns, a single shoot putting out a large radial plant.  It fits where there is space.  This is a rule of nature.  

We are are more conscious (or at least try to pretend to be) over here in civilization.  The conscious effort of so much rational thought.  Organized, somehow.  It is not the rules of nature over here.  These are different rules.  We like to naturalize them, but they are different.  We have the opportunity to reflect.  We think.  There is a world of difference between the following of impulses and the deliberative approach.  We presume a deliberation.  We like to think so.  That somewhere, someone is paying attention, enough attention.  We like to think so.  We reflect upon ourselves sometimes -- perhaps from faulty premises, but the effort ought to be appreciated -- and consider and deliberate.  This spurge seized the day in the mottled jungle of tropical coastal plants, it will live on.

The Something

There are so many plants living in the Palm Hammock that some of them have escaped my view. And then, one day, I happen upon a gem, a rare, unknown beauty. Many, like this one, are small flowering annuals that can live on into several seasons because of the region's mild climate. This plant does not appear in my identification manual. Nor am I enough of a botanist to track it down in a technical key. But it is a beautiful specimen. Its leaves are long and narrow, unusually sturdy for an annual species of plant. They curl up ever so slightly along their length. Five, as you see, accompany each florescence, the florescence each comprised of tiny bursts of nearly petal-less flowers with small straight pistil and stamen. The plant itself is rigid and almost awkward in form. Long stretches of stalk, insect-leg joints with a fan of almost lance-like leaves and these delightful bursts of symmetrical reproductive tissue. It needs a name. It has already evoked a meaning.

And so this anonymous plant, and so many like it, live on in that cherished plat of land saved there on the west side of campus. Its flowers will erupt for the next several weeks, rains feeding its patient roots. The same weeks in which the national charade unfolds again. Will world-changing tectonic events follow in the wake of a Democratic victory in November? Yes, and no. It will calm what have been very muddied waters and sooth what have been irritated wounds and it will return the reigns of power to the hands of people who use fact-based reasoning to make their cases. But the real changes will have to come from within, or below, or around. There are immanent reconsiderations and re-visionings waiting to be performed. You and I must do that. Here, where we live. Like this unnamed something that holds itself anonymously beautiful and decorates my restoration project on the sand heap at the eastern edge of the Gulf of Mexico, we might all find some renewed obligation to produce beauty just because.

Dogs and Sedges

This plot of land, filled with dog fennel and sedge, sprouting live oak and buttonwood, blooming gaillarda and beach sunflower. This plot of land, worked by the hands of dozens in this community, rag tag as it is. These cabbage palms, the Ludwigia (Ludwigia leptocarpa) growing new leaves out of the top of seemingly dead last year's stalk, capeweed and ground cherry, vines and grasses. This verdant land.

Eucalyptus towering in the background, the anomalous exotic, planted by some other idea before the final plans for the school took shape. These trees that have drawn the most attention this past year, housing three settlements under their branches, notched tree limbs and ridiculous rope contraptions.

This palm hammock, where coyote and marsh rabbit roam, where hand to hand labor exhumes the twisted bodies of root mass and tangled strands of root that gave life to the carpet brush created by Brazilian pepper plants. Where clearings like this one appear where they were theorized not to have a chance.

Theories.

The cause

Gaillardia. Perhaps the most showy of Florida native flowers. These delightful draught tolerant flowers are known locally as 'blanket flowers.' They fill up your flower bed like a thick winter blanket. Their leaves are almost succulent. White hairs seem to reflect the sun's heat. Their very appearance is suggestive of the sun itself. A sunburst.
Gaillardia pulchella, blanket flower, frequenter of sandy spots in the vicinity of the coast. This one erupted on the sandy plain of my restoration project. It got there with my help; I tossed seeds out all fall. But it grew of its own volition, and survives of its own will. There are some who reject this
absence of purity, the hand of man, the hand of me. But when you see these colors, blooming amidst browning sedge seeds and bright green dog fennel, you cannot help but feel a small pang of joy. They seem to float above the succeeding annuals and they seem they want to stay. It hasn't rained here for two months. We need the water from the skies because we have no real soils and our top layer is porous sand. We have drained for two years. Draught. And still these flowers bloom and cover the ground in a thick blanket of leafy, stalky, plant cells. Cooling the ground, drawing water from the most remote and unlikely of earth material. The presence of adaptation. Some things, they say,
stay incessantly the same, while others shift and adjust. Which parts work together how? What ways of seeing are respected and considered? We try to integrate our own best thoughts into something altogether stylish. We wish, sometimes, that things had been easier. All of our efforts seem shamefully short sighted. But when we pause, as I think some of us have paused, when we wait for that moment and rather than force, persuasion. We find something profoundly our own, or somehow deeply everyone's. We realize that we all want to shine, each in our own way. And shine we shall. Bright orange pedal dreams, yellow tipped fantasies, alive in the air where no living thing was given much hope.
Flourishing, where only dreams had reigned.

To talk, anymore, is the worst of fates. Talking has nothing but traps. To hope for a better day, to want to inspire, seems to attract the most loathing of spite. And, yet, talk we must, and hope we do. Another season in the sacred Palm Hammock has come around and life is blooming and buzzing and howling like life wonts to do.

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.