While I’m posting old things, here is another from my notebook, also written last year.
I hold an orange, ruby light of the sky refracts through it. My hands, articulate, separate sections off the orange and bring them to my mouth, the mind comprehending all, trying to articulate in turn this experience (never rest!)
A tree has made this orange, crafted it, constructed it to be sweet and delicate, protected in its leathery shell, like a secret whose sweet solution I have learned from my ancestors. But the tree makes this fruit. It is a creator which inherited this task from its ancestors, and each fruit contains seeds, which may continue the tree’s line.
It makes the fruit out of habit — no longer are the fruits harvested in the wild and the seeds spread by careless rodentia. The tree’s family succeeds not by attracting rodents but by contract with humans, who will continue the persistence of this tree’s family as long as it pleases them to eat their fruit.
As the mouse gathers the nut and stores it for food and procreation of the nut’s species — as this is advantageous for mouse and nut, so it is advantageous for us to take to each other. To find and be found, pluck and be plucked, to keep home together, for pleasure and to pass our seed. The human procreative relationship is reciprocal, and warm, creating a mutually beneficial situation that is the bosom of our children. Thus is love arisen, does it emerge from this earth.
It being nearly April again, I thought I’d post something I wrote last April that I just found in my notebook.
In Davis in April in this dry valley almost too big to be called a valley created by an inland sea flooded year after year by the Sacramento River by the American River by the Yuba River by Putah Creek the soil enriched over the centuries by silt these carried from the high mountains of the Sierra from the crumbling mountains of the coastal range from the hilly unknown lands to the north, in this dry valley I sit, and breathe.
I breathe the rich dry eair of Yolo County, full like soil of decaying plant matter of dung of carcasses, all these returned to dust and settled into soil, and sometimes blown in gusts to enrich this air. I sit on a lawn a large and well-kempt lawn of the university which nevertheless is populated by a large variety of weeds, is strewn with oak leaves like the innumerable stars that can be seen from mountain-tops. In a season these leaves will be dust and soil and compost, their ancient life force slowly absorbed by the roots of plants.
I sit under a cork-oak whose leaves are falling (it may be sick) and who provides me with a delicious shade on this warm April day, mixed deliciously with patches of sunshine. The clouds too conspire to bring my life these ingredients, lazy flocks of cumulus humilis slowly floating eastwards from the sea perhaps to bring the high Sierras another dusting of snow. It has been a dry Winter but not utterly devoid of water, and the reservoirs are middling full. Spring has come unhindered, and Davis is full of butterflies now though bees are few this year.
I love this air that smells of compost. I love to walk in the sun and in the shade in Davis in the springtime. I love the university with its many workers and many students, and its many seekers of truth, or money. Out of this good soil has been cultivated a great campus of learning and employ, by the grace of God. Here has sprung up a community of people around the campus, and the old Davis needs all this too to survive — we all must love each other truly here in this earth, while we breathe the rich air, while we walk in the sun-soaked pathways of the university at Davis.