and in the travelled space, stars
and something else,  like god
uncorrected unprotected
in between, without

I don't  purport to have any concise precise answers; I know there is no magic wand to wave, but I also know that if we want generous loving lives in a compassionate world,  we need to revise old tired systems, abandon violence and war, long favored and applauded by the hierarchies of power, including most political systems and organized religion.

We're not going to save the world by maiming  and killing one another. I know what you're  thinking -- oh, goodness, how naive! Tell that to the politicians. Tell that to the corporate raiders. Tell that to every sneering mean-spirited pompous self-righteous man or woman who has blamed the poor for their poverty, the sick for their illness, the ignorant for their ignorance, the grieving for their sorrow.

Okay, do that.

Tell them, quietly and firmly, without shouting. Forgive student loans. Regulate financial systems and insurance companies. Adequately fund public education. Reduce the cost of health care and make it available to all. Help our world to bloom.

Elsewhere ice is still holding back the green, but here it is spring. Perhaps it's a spring too early, but it's spring, the season when imaginations run to dreams of peaceful days and visions of verdant summer gardens alive with fruit and flowers. True, this year rainstorms have gone missing, and that's a worry. There are more and more people crowded up against the coast, more and more water consumed daily, and the skies are brilliant blue even in the earliest morning hours.  No rain, but in all that blue, can't we find a rock near a hidden spring perhaps where we might anchor a human bridge that might take us hand over hand from old to new, here to there?

Or are we going to once again leave it up to God and/or Government?

I've always thought of God as nothing more than the space between, that which both holds us apart from one another and simultaneously provides connection,  a borderless place where we store all our knowledge, all our love.  The only God I know is love. I never could imagine 'a' God, slipped inside a body, perched upon a throne, soberly surveying the troubled paradise below. Thinking of God as that vibrant space between, human life can perhaps be imagined as the Bridge between.  We are the builders of the Bridge. We get to decide which stones we'll use, how much concrete we pour, how high our Bridge will soar, how far its reach. We can choose to eschew those flimsily manufactured pillars of violence and cruelty, choose instead to build the every day with sturdier stock, using only the willowy branches of love and hope lashed together with kindness and generosity.  As for Government.  .  .  well that would be us, wouldn't it? We the people, remaining flexible and fluid, retaining the dream.

Spring is a hopeful dreamy season, a kind Bridge built of earth spirits and sky shadows, one that allows us to slip from darkness into light. Nothing is yet ripe (except the citrus fruits, lemons everywhere) and anything rotten is being greedily consumed by the new growth of old plants. Bursting in bloom, flowering cherries and plums are redrawing horizons, coaxing winter skies to the earth below where those flowers that are the true markers of a Northern California spring -- poppies and oxalis -- are opening to the sun as exuberant and as brilliant as they are short-lived._

Life is short. Live lovingly. Do no harm. Practice random acts of Kindness. Be generous. Make art.

Why not?

Boats and flowers: what a child sees
and butterflies, what a child dreams
. . . or sees, could be, beneath
a waterfall of green January leaves.

The sea never gossips. It just pushes its waters through deep channels, sucks away sands with currents strong enough to create graceful curves as perfect as prayer is not.

When the moon pulls the tide away from the shore,  great lines of red seaweed  trace a delicate firm beauty on the sands that stay behind.  . . .  When tides of gossip pull away, what remains are gaping holes, crashed trust, ruined lives, misery.

_What brings order to my chaotic world is never gossip. It is instead the sympathy of distance, mountains made light by a floating line of ducks and a settled row of rocks. Gossip is just flotsam and jetsam, so much plastic trash to be raked, sorted, and bagged.

 
So let the fuses blow. As the rain draws in the details of otherwise dusty trees, washes clean the stones beneath, I fold into my heart, restart the dream.

That doesn’t mean I use rainy days as excuses to curl up under piles of blankets. When the rain came, I was up early and out early, anxious to discover some of those focused shadows, made more visible by changed light and the close quarters of a newly shuttered world. Like Francis Bacon who wrote in Novum Organinum that knowledge is built usefully from observable detail, I seek detail, knowing those details as representative of emotional states, collective decisions, that are at first invisible or insecure to the observer, but I never enter into a day certain as to what that day will offer me. I cherish that insecurity and what it yield, and here I part from Bacon and his belief that If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. I share his interest in doubt but have little interest in certainty.

Indeed, I have never encountered it.

On this day of rain, I was hoping for surprises – spiders descending suddenly from rain-sogged pine boughs,  shiny stalks of mushrooms pushing through previously dry soil, inexplicable blooms of earth and stone that might recall those pitch black airy explosions that happen on the hot bottoms of ovens when yams burst and drip sugar-sweet orange flesh onto metal. Of course, I found none of that. What I did find was detail revealing a much larger picture. Imagine, for example, spying the spoke of the wheel belonging to a chariot so huge, so fast and powerful that it might  erase the distance between earth and sun in less than the amount of time than it takes for a poppy to unfold ts petals. I found  distant views brought close, great trees bowed down, cities compacted by roiling clouds, light collapsed by dark. That kind of detail.

Sometimes it is very necessary to see small bits of the larger picture up close – especially in these times when the world seems to have lost all reason. How can it even be possible, for example, that Newt Gingrich is even being considered as remotely presidential? Now there's a detail that troubles me.

_Who would support a sadist who wants to expand Guantanamo Bay and advocates for “enhanced interrogation procedures,” i.e. torture, and a two-tiered justice system that includes military tribunals? Who would even listen to a homophobic man who as the co-author of the Defense of Marriage Act speaks hatefully about same-sex marriage and seems to feel that it might be good idea to reinstate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”? Who would even offer to listen to a miserable misogynist who supports a ban on granting Federal funds to any organization offering abortion services? Who would pay any attention at all to such a hater of freedom and free speech who believes the Patriot Act is a good thing and wants to expand its powers to provide closer and more intense surveillance of American citizens? Why would anyone vote for a mean-spirited narrow-minded man who supports the re-establishment of orphanages to save on welfare? How can there possibly be folks who would think it a good idea to have a man in the White House who abandoned his wife because “she’s too old to be the wife of a president and besides she has cancer”? Have Americans become so heartless, so cruel, that they would consider voting for such a mean man, or are they just impossibly stupid, ignorant of the man’s words and acts?

There he sits, beefy red, a detail focused by the fog, a festering sore on the body politic, a man who declares (and believes) that he “articulates the deepest felt values” of American voters. I certainly hope not, but as someone who understands how specific detail can reveal the larger picture, how a flower speaks the spring, how a tree etched into a rain-swept sky can outline the days of drought it has endured, I tremble. I hope this  boorish man is not representative of American thought and deed.

_ And so I rest my eyes (and my heart) on details that remind me of the power of the earth. I watch waters move from the ocean into the bay, think about the great distance those waters have traveled, recall the healing power of the sea. I watch rain drip from leaves, soak the earth below, and think of the simplicity of growth. I know when I am walking uphill under trees, watching the waters of the Golden Gate, I may be engaging in a sort of escapism, experiencing a kind of foolish hope, but I cannot allow myself to drown in the putrid swamps revealed by the pockmarked detail of mean-spirited nasty folk like Gingrich.

The Devil may well be in the details, but I have to believe that an awareness of those details and the larger picture that they represent can build useful knowledge, even wisdom, something that some might call salvation. I believe that to look closely is to remember well, making bold revision possible.

  By mid-afternoon, when the rain finally arrives, I sit on the porch in the grey drizzle, tasting the outside of the storm and watching the street. Across the way, a young woman wearing a bright turquoise ball cap – _the brightest spot in all this grey – slouches down in a late model sports car, parked at the bus stop, talking on her phone. When the street sweeper rumbles up behind, she swings her car around to the other side of the street and then back again. When the bus slows and pulls to the curb, she flips on her headlamps and drives away. Her rhythm (or lack thereof) is emblematic of this rainy afternoon -- few cars, fewer people, and little sound other the rattle of the trains passing on the overpass at the end of the street. The rain -- gentle, breathless, and almost invisible -- has emptied the street. My dog has gone to sleep. Maybe I will, too.

Behind this rusty dog, closer to the house, stands a tall yellow birdcage, empty except for a few sprays of always blooming plastic flowers and a hand-written sign that reads:

                                                                           Those who like to sing will always find a song.

Down by the bay, the frost lay heavy on the ground. Fortunately, the plants didn't seem distressed, just over-dressed. Ordinarily sedate ground covers were bedecked and bedazzled with hundreds of miniature stars folding ice across the green, catching light  as  silver foil might.  Yellow flowers opened to the morning sun, their petals edged crystal white as if they had been dipped into a sugar bath and left to dry overnight. Even the sea grass had gone powder blue.

It was cold -- cold enough to settle the air to crystal but not cold enough to kill. By mid-morning the frost had melted down to dew, and by afternoon, the day was positively balmy. All traces of ice had been lifted clean away and the sky rubbed out to a transparent opalescence. The air was so clear that the coastal mountains, ordinarily a smudged smokiness on the horizon, appeared crisply etched on the sky. I swear I could even see the trees. It was as if when the silver frost was peeled away, the earth exploded into an impossibly saturated techincolor 3-D movie with every element crisply drawn and precisely placed.  Suddenly all color, even the palest pastels, swelled 10% richer, all line cut deeper and finer, all solid planes polished to a tenderness more expansive  than the grandest vista. It was a day to fall in love with winter spring summer fall, with everything, with all, to collapse into the music of the earth, beating its erratic rhythm between morning frost, the warm heart of noon, and the clash of evening chill.

Tonight promises to be colder still and then rain, serious rain, is forecast. We are grateful for the rain -- it has been very dry (too dry) lately -- but bitter cold we can do without. I wonder if the plants will recover tomorrow with the same bounce as they did today. It depends, of course, on how many hours temperatures stay below freezing, how quickly the sun returns its grace. We'll just have to wait and see. Spring has already opened its mouth to sing, and I'm hoping it won't get all huffy and go away, prove itself a too timid star for such a makeshift stage. I doubt it. Spring's a hearty barefoot diva, used to temperamental costars like winter. Bare branched quince bushes are already erupting into flower and patches of narcissus are nearing the end of their bloom. Roses and clematis are coming back to leaf. Icelandic and California poppies alike are sending up multiple flower stalks, and hardy little violas have lately been looking more cheerful. . . Bring on the rain and heave the frost.