The ground is mostly frozen, many plants are dead and almost everyone else is sleeping—no fluffy green, no bright flowers, no insects but for the wooly worms curled up under fallen leaves. Birds sing, squirrels chatter and I carefully prune the chaos that reigns in the absence of structure. We live on several acres, about half of which is forest I’ve been working with for the past few years—little trees grow from seeds scattered by the wind, but they won’t survive all clustered together. Massive trees with dead branches hanging, waiting to fall; vines grow everywhere and apparently they can kill trees. This is the perfect time of year for this work for 2 reasons and the one is all about bugs. The second reason is laying seeds to cover a lot ground is an ideal thing to do right before a snowfall.
I once heard an interesting tidbit about birdsong—an indicator that a land is toxic is there are no birds. This land around us has changed a lot during the past couple of decades and I wish we owned at least a half-mile in every direction. Unfortunately for local wildlife, land is eventually grabbed up for processing and rural spaces are perfect for cows or farming—sometimes I feel an anxious pressure to preserve land in it’s natural state, but that’s been challenging without money to buy it or a pack of warriors to protect it. I often imagine really wild things coming into play to protect places like this from destructive human development—like ancestor spirits or ancient monsters. So many things have happened within humanity during the past two decades that no one has ever experienced; the word unprecedented has been used more often in three years than in all of history combined, I’ll wager. So isn’t this also a time for ghosts and aliens to set up shop among us? Just a thought.
In the meanwhile, in a few hours I’ll pack my tools and dress warmly so to do my work on our path—taking down vines, ripping up weeds, and raking away leaves to expose the sweet Earth in which we shall sprinkle our seeds. That could sound a lot more pervy, but it’s early…
