Take your place on the great Mandala
As it moves through your brief moment of time
Win or lose now, you must choose now
And if you lose youre only losing your life
The Great Mandala, Mary Travers, Peter Yarrow, Albert Grossman
I have to confess the Farm is barely large enough to qualify. At 10 acres, it is a bit on the small side to be a working farm. Yet it is large enough to hold animals were we to wish to raise any, and is definitely of enough size to challenge the two old – and getting older – folks who live here by ourselves. Well, not precisely by ourselves, since there are four cats and three lovebirds inside the house, and 10 acres worth of assorted plants and varied wildlife outside. Both kinds of life add to our challenges as well as to our satisfaction with living on this land.
At any given moment, the Farm is also big enough to encompass both ends of life. In her annual spring ritual, Helen has planted many new flowers and more than a few seeds, so we are assured that new life will appear this year. The pines lining our driveway are busy contributing new life as well, for many of them have quite a striking crop of developing cones. There are several new pine shoots sprouting along the hillside on which their parents grow, evidence of the efficacy and fertility of last year’s pine cone crop: some will mature; some will be nibbled to death by deer, voles, moles, or other critters; and some will be pulled out by human hand for having committed the sin of growing too close to something they might well have avoided but for the serendipity of fate.
And since it is spring, new life dominates all we can see from our windows. For new life isn’t restricted to newly planted shoots or bulbs. Our mature plants are adding new spring finery – new growth in that particular shade of bright pea green which takes a season in the sun to darken into just another branch or twig. Young birds and animals have yet to make their appearance, but given the birds’ energy and their constant song, new bird life isn’t far off. Thanks to the magic of time, the two fawns from last spring seem to have grown into young deer who have that certain look about them. They display themselves now more casually than they did last fall; I suspect they are distracted by lustful thoughts and risk discovery by human eyes in the heat of the chase. Since most of our years here on the Farm seem to have produced new fawns wandering about in an infant daze under the watchful eye of a nervous doe, I have no reason to believe that this year won’t eventually provide evidence of the cycle repeating itself anew.
But this spring is also a time of death on the Farm. Two tall pines adjacent to the house have died and are soon to be taken down by a professional tree surgeon. Their needles have turned brown and, in the case of the tallest of the two, have fallen with incredible dispatch. Helen first noticed needle showers underneath this giant several weeks ago, and the tree is now virtually a skeleton, moss already accumulating on its branches. Whatever the cause of its death, it was quick and sudden (and, hopefully, painless) in terms of tree chronology. The other dying pine lingers on with spots of fading green amid a vast sea of brown. It still retains many needles, despite being the first of the two to demonstrate to us its intention to expire. We realized it was dying last spring, but decided to give it one last year before having it removed. From the state of the roof edge underneath it, we might have been smarter to cut it down when we first noticed its impending death, but I simply didn’t have the heart. Besides, its lingering death knell has done us a good turn: because of the resultant heavy needle fall, we hired a man to blow off our roof and it is now clean of pine needles and the blessed recipient of an anti-moss application.
The stumps of both trees will remain. I haven’t the equipment or the inclination to remove them. I am hoping each will come to harbor new evidence of life: offshoots; squirrel holes; birds nests; woodpecker drilling sites; insect grubs. Damn it, even blackberry canes would be welcome, despite their indestructibility and Farm-wide omnipresence. (As an aside, I find it imperative to state that I have come to believe that individual blackberry canes possess intelligence; that they knowingly lay in wait, only to begin growth at that precise most-vulnerable instant when humanity, unnoticing of them or the prospect of them, has passed by a likely spot where they might prosper. And since any old spot, no matter how bleak, how desolate, or how unlikely from a human perspective, looks, to a blackberry cane, to be an appropriate spot from which it may grow and spring, I often have the feeling that new canes are a form of woodsy locomotion used by the parent bushes to follow us about and spy upon our doings.)
The taller of the two dying pines is planted on a hillside and its roots will continue to serve by holding the hillside in place, helping in death to keep it from sliding into the downhill meadow it overlooks. In this way, the stump will continue in service to this land, to this Farm, both by providing continuing stabilization to the hillside as it decays until such time as new growth is able to take its place and as a cradle for other forms of new life. I can only wish to emulate this cycle. I have long wished to be cremated and have my ashes serve as compost for the roots of a newly planted tree – perhaps an apple or other fruit bearing tree – so that I might benefit the growth of something new; something which will eventually die and become a nurse log for yet other new life in its turn. What better use could there be for one’s remains?
I’ll miss this particular hemlock – a stately, worshipful, brooding tree – a great deal, since it is one of the two largest trees on the Farm and has long done duty as one of the Farm’s two giant sentinels who watch for our return home when we’ve been away. Soon, only its neighboring giant will remain on solitary watch; soon only its stump will remain as its monument. We haven’t any choice but to remove it, since it grew very close to the house and the inevitably falling branches would likely damage the house severely or possibly take one or the other of us with them on their way to ground.
And so this small Farm is large enough – large enough to contain and respect both ends of a single life; large enough to accommodate the curious vitality of the overlapping waves by which the concept of life is sustained. The Farm is small enough for us to know there isn’t a single cottonwood tree on the premises, but large enough for cottonwood spindrift to have become as if a blizzard this spring when the winds are just right. This spring, the spindrift is arriving in more frequent and heavier-than-usual clouds; each a drift of minute seeds swaddled in fluff, each cast away by a hopeful parent to produce life or to fail to produce life as the winds and fate decree and as the Farm’s hospitality may allow. The blackberry canes had best be aware they have a challenger for dominance this spring, as the spindrift leaves little doubt of its intention.
And so it goes.
