Friday, April 25, 2008

It is Arbor Day

Arbor Day

At the Blue View Lane Center for Pollen Research we celebrate Arbor day during the same week as earth day. In Michigan it is the final Friday in April...Today....Whoop-ee.

It has been one beautiful week here at Blue View Lane, slightly north of the 44th parallel, overlooking Torch lake and lake Michigan. The blues of the water against the white birch, the reddish maple buds, the darker cherry have combined for magnificent vistas. What a spot.

Arbor Day, Earth week, why do we celebrate, why do we notice, why do we worry, why do we observe? The Answer is we cannot help it. Even of we do not set a date we notice. It is impossible not to sense the spring. Mankind takes note because we are as natural as the trees, the sky, the wind and rain. We grow and wither like the forests. Our essence comes from the natural world. It is when we lose track of this that we have problems. We celebrate so we don’t forget, especially in springtime when the animal portions of our DNA just cannot not notice. Sap runs in humans too.

Man’s finest creativity, his art, his buildings, his sculpture, fiction and music all come from the natural world. Rodin with his sculptures, his people with their lengthy limbs- roots into the earth. Mahler with his moody reverent nature (listen to the third, the sixth sympony) Van Gogh with his sunflowers, Monet-his water lilies, Aron Copeland and his Appalachian Spring, Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps.

And fiction.... It is everywhere from Moby Dick, the struggle ... Ahab’s demonic Great White Whale. To this random and hastily selected bit of boat and sky from my second novel, 'A Builder's Tale'.

‘The glorious blue North of earlier in the day had retreated from the sky and with the winds shift East arrived greater humidity and clouds. The horizon going a flat bruised yellow-gray, and the water, no longer the azure of the morning, now turned a forceful stormy tarnished silver. The wind continued to build as he spun the Anomie bow first to the waves. The halyard clanged as he raised the mainsail, flapping snapping to the winds whistling increased howl. Wilson shut off the diesel and let the Anomie slide off the wind, due North, into a quartering, building, white clotting sea... the little sloop turning from form to function.... Becoming alive.’ See http://www.jmatsonheininger.com/

To this perfect opening passage of Ken Kesey’s magnificent second novel ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’, which says it all.

"Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range....come look: the hysterical crashing of tributeries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River....
The first little washes flashing like thick rushing winds through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, sheering, cutting....forming branches. Then through bearberry and salmonberry, blueberry and blackberry, the branches crashing into creeks, into streams. Finally, in the foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark and silver spruce- and the green and blue mosaic of Douglas fir- the actual river falls five hundred feet....and look: opens out upon the fields.Metallic at first, seen from the highway, down through the trees, like an aluminum rainbow, like a slice of alloy moon.............."

WOW!

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