Spring

    I’m sitting here at my desk, windows open, light pouring in, listening to the squeals of the baby birds outside as they patiently wait for their parents to return with stomachs full of food.  I’ve returned home from another day of work, and that feeling of isolation in this world has almost overcome me once again, as it often does in the Spring, when life begins again.  The flowers are blooming even on the trees and a new generation of wild babies are born.  I have to force myself to stop sometimes, pull myself away from the lines on the screen or the paper, to pluck the lilacs from the bush out back to smell one of my favorite scents before the flowers die for yet another year.  I have to push myself out the door sometimes to take in the warm weather that has returned after months of starkness and cold.  I have to do these things despite the fact that I am in love with the natural world and always amazed that Nature has all the answers, answers to questions we haven’t even asked yet.  I can blame society all I want, but it won’t change things.  I can write and write about how humanity has lost its beating heart, left it behind somewhere out at sea or in the desert, but it does no good.  As I walk by a pair of Canada Geese watching over their babies as they mow the grass with their beaks in the parking lot at my job, I note how no one else pays attention or a coworker feels he needs to grab his gun upon the sight of them.  I think of Emerson’s plea to his readers--remain ever youthful inside, like a child seeing the moon for the first time--and think that I am desperately holding onto that last bit of youth inside me as this world slowly eats away at me.  That’s where the feeling of isolation comes in. 
    I love the smell of a forest, that sweet scent.  I hate the smell of cologne, its thickness chokes me.  I love the way the sunlight makes everything appear so clearly.  I hate the way fluorescent lights bother my eyes.  I’ve always had a thing for hands and noted their beauty, but hate the fist and the blow that comes with it or the finger pulling the trigger, as the eyes of the victim widen in shock before the light is stopped from passing through them anymore.  Some people prefer animals dead, posted on their walls or on their backs.  I prefer mine alive, as they live their instinctual existence almost in mockery of ours.  They seem to have the answers, to have it all figured out as we scrape to survive on the streets where no one cares unless you have money in your pocket.  The cat’s pupils widen to let the light in from that other side we think will embrace us someday, and the connection is made with energies that we block out with our radio waves--the sonic absence that silently yet ruthlessly torments our bodies though our eyes can’t see it.  I have seen one too many animals suffering and die as I remained helplessly watching on, not knowing what to do, unable to do anything.  And I spent far too long as a stoic.  It’s time for life; it’s time to use these hands, not just these words. 
    Bowden says Nature is art and so our attempts at art are futile: 
    “The patterns of snakeskin are the envy of textile designers.  The rattle moves at forty to seventy cycles a second and generally has a pitch between a C and C-sharp.  The snakes’ state of grace is not a performance but a life.  We struggle for style, they are born a style.  We struggle for mannerism, they live a court etiquette where every expression of being is as severely restricted as the sequence of a Japanese tea ceremony.  I do not think snakes make art.  I think they live art.  There may be little innovation but there are no faltering or loutish moves….They live in a great amphitheater of sensations, we live in a stale closet of concerns.  Of course, we are also wily.  We make a great fuss of this thing we call Art and insist that it distinguishes us from other organisms.  We relentlessly track its origins in figurines of fat women, scratches on bones, paintings in caves, and the arrangements made for our dead.  If Art matters, it matters simply as an indicator of how seldom we see or feel or touch or taste or flick our tongues against the endless parade coursing through the air.” – Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead are Still Breathing
    And we love to compare ourselves to the animals, the animals we feel so superior to that we feel we should control.  A woman may have the wide, innocent eyes of a doe, a man may have the strength of a bull, someone may be as sly and cunning as a fox.  Yet we hunt deer and fight and kill bulls and send the dogs to take down the foxes.  We want to fly like the birds yet shoot them from the skies.  We long to travel down to the deepest levels of the ocean to see what’s down there, or at the very least swim amidst the living rainbow that is a coral reef, yet we throw poisons into the water and kill the lives that call it home.  Constantly comparing ourselves, dressing up in their furs and feathers, apparently preferring them dead than alive.  Perhaps it’s jealousy because deep down we know that we can have all the paintings and all the sculptures of the human form we like but we will never compare.  We lack the colors and the designs and so we rip them off the backs of those who have them, then put a high price on the stolen merchandise. 
    But no matter how many times you try, everyone’s too busy or too tired to pay any mind.  I care not for violence and domination and so want to a see a world that has not been tarnished--see that river lined with trees looking crystal clear instead of brown, see that forest that was once under the new highway.  But that was taken from me, and no one asked if it was okay.  Nor do they ask me today if it’s okay to pollute my land, my birthright, as it is for every other living thing.  Adults don’t seem to remember how to share.  Nevertheless, it is Spring, and Summer will be here any minute, when the babies begin their first year on Earth and learn to avoid us at every turn.  For now, I’ll stop to listen to them and take in the scents in the air, knowing that, although so much of me is numb, I am alive because I care.

-Lisa Selvaggio
(Originally Posted on 5/20/09)