Crocuses, again

The crocuses are back, spearing their way through last summer's leaves, reminding me (again) that spring is possible.

I lose faith when I lose my way, when I no longer feel the rhythms of the natural world in my bones, when I spend more time under fluorescent light than I do under the sun.

We pretend that we can educate children for a global village, with standards and standardization, through prescribed algorithms. We forget that the lamb in front of us will age, will die, just as we will age, will die.

And in a hundred years, the crocuses will again break through the frozen ground, as alive as you and I are alive today, with as much purpose.

If you do not know what our purpose is for being here, and it is unlikely that you do, then why do you impose the will of strangers on the children in your community?

I think we all need to spend a day just silently watching the sun wend its way across the sky.

"Staying in between the lines"

Now and then it keeps you running
It never seems to die
The trial's spent with fear
Not enough living on the outside

Never seem to get far enough
Staying in between the lines
Hold on what you can
Waiting for the end not knowing when

 from "Windfall," Son Volt

Backyard crocuses, 2013

Today marks the last day of the darkest 6 weeks of the year in these parts.
Tomorrow will bring us back to November light.
And Imbolc will be just 3 weeks away.

Under the frozen earth the crocuses next to the old bare oak tree are starting to stir. Chromosomes are replicating, cells dividing, tough spears forming, getting ready to pierce their way to the sunlight.

Not sure they know why they go through all the fuss, not likely a question they they ask, pretty sure the answer wouldn't matter to them anyway.
But they at least know where they're going.

Even if we could decipher the language of plants, we could not grasp their answer to such a question.
It won't involve money or fame or power or self-esteem.
The point may seem without value in a culture that does not value living.

Hard to commodify the thoughts of a flower.

The end of winter

Our crocuses bloomed today. A tiny horseshoe crab, smaller than my thumbnail, crawled out of the Delaware Bay. The day lilies are rising again, like Phoenixes from the snow's ashes.

All of this is more real than the nonsense that passes for discourse in the education world. I can still close my classroom door (though I rarely do) and tackle whatever problems we care to tackle that day.

Why is my plant wilting? Hey, sow bug babies! I think my slug drowned.
How come the starfish hasn't moved in three days? Are those mosquitoes?
Look! Peas!

We got kids from Somalia, from Sierra Leone, from Poland, from China, from Ghana. Not third generation, not second. We're talking off the airplane (Newark Liberty International Airport) and into the brink. I taught a child who spoke only Bengali.

And we thrive.

We thrive despite the mandates, the tests, the current climate that forgets the roots of the word public, "pertaining to the people." Our town supported the last budget, despite the struggles of family after family after family.


Families that come from desperate situations know education matters. Families that come from desperate situations value teachers who care about their children. They put their trust in our hands, in our classrooms.

So while the elite press on about this magnet school, that philosophy, the myriad ways to use (and abuse) technology, scouring the US News and World Report for college rankings (and the NJ Monthly for state rankings), most of the rest of us go about our business, getting children ready for loving, happy, and (yes) productive lives.

But never just productive.

I work for Bloomfield, and its families, and for its children. I do not work for Arne Duncan, I do not work for Governor Christie. I give my all every day, because I want my lambs to be happy, in the Jeffersonian sense, and I want them prepared to pursue whatever dreams they hope to pursue.

I wiled away a good chunk of the afternoon on a jetty poking into the bay. I stared at barnacles for a bit, mourned all the oysters scraped off the rocks by this year's ice. The water was exceptionally clear, revealing thousands of comb jellies, floating in with the tides, then floating out again.

My happiest moments are spent on the edges of the sea. 

I stumbled upon the horseshoe crab, not much different than its ancestors that wandered these same shores when dinosaurs still roared. It may be still alive, it may be in the belly of a gull now. Tomorrow I will share its story with my students, because for them, these stories still matter.

And then I will test them on meiosis and synapses and centromeres and chromatids, to get them ready for the state exam in May. Those who finish early will be allowed to study their terrariums, their aquariums, to see how their critters did over the weekend.

 And the day will not be completely wasted, the last Sunday of February, as the light returns, and all things, all things, again become possible.

All photos taken today.

 First one crocuses, then the tiny (and live) horseshoe crab, then the points of a dead horseshoe crab, 

then barnacles hanging out waiting for the next tide, 

and finally, light as seen through the compound eyes of a horseshoe crab.

Happy as a clam

Yesterday a blowout tide rolled back the waters, farther back than I've seen. We got a mess of clams, including the one above, and we enjoyed them.

I must have looked like a madman, feet clad in sandals and smiling at no one as I leaned into the winter breeze to rake the flats, clam after clam after clam. I was happy. I have a hypothesis as to why.

***

Look at the edge of the quahog shell--each tooth glistening in tonight's setting sun, each with a complementary notch on the other shell. A cherry stone can clam up tightly for days when need be.

This particular clam looks about 15 years old or so, and may easily have lived another 15 years. I have no idea if it was happy, but I do know this much--every thing about the clam's existence helped it live as long as it did, where it did.

It evaded minnows the 1 or 2 weeks it spent swimming as a larva. Its tough shell protected it from whelk and starfish, horseshoe crabs and gulls. It survived the icy cold winter waters and the warm wash of summer. It ate, it grew, it reproduced, and last night it died.

Our crocuses are near bursting now--in a few weeks, bees will visit their open flowers, and will leave covered with bright yellow pollen. Everything about the crocus has a use. Look at the picture. The spears are now blunt from poking through the frozen ground, still protected by sheaths at their bases; the whole plant leans towards the sun, catching photons.

Descent with modification does not require a master plan. Each tooth on the clam, each petal on a crocus has a cost. Order requires energy. Every organism seems to be designed exactly for its niche--we assume, reasonably, that every part (if organisms truly have parts) has a purpose.

And if so, what is ours? Without delving into the metaphysical and the mystical, just look at your hands, your arms, your eyes, your nose. We have been been around a long, long time, far longer than computers, far longer than the written word, far longer than spoken language that we believe defines us.

We twist ourselves into our own universes, contorting to squeeze ourselves into schedules guided by clocks and not stars, by words and not smells, by imagined fears and not the predators that used to hunt us in the night.

When I am on the flats, a stiff wind sending whiffs of death and salt from the exposed flats, my fingers wrapped around my rake, waiting for the telling vibration of metal against living shell, I am alive as alive can be, everything aligned for the hunt, anticipating the feast that waits.

I sliced my finger pretty good yesterday, and rinsed it in the muddy waters--brilliant crimson drops splashed on the beach like small carnations, feeding critters too small to see. My hands were numb from the cold, and I knew I'd feel it later. None of the fear I'd have felt indoors, where wounds seem foreign.

My hypothesis? The more we use our bodies, our minds, our senses, our being for being, the happier we are.  Just a hypothesis, true, but what have been your happiest moments?

Photos taken today.

It may just be that I am, in fact, bats.

Death and crocuses

(Just my annual Bloomfield crocus phenology post. Move along, nothing to see....)

We're thawing in February.

The pond ice is melting.
Two fish floated, lifeless, on top.
Winter is over for them.

Crocus spears pierce the Earth.
Spring is just starting for them.

For us?
We have light, we have grace, and, for the moment, we have time.

For the moment.
And a moment is all that is promised us.

Grace

Crocus spears erupting through last autumn's maple leaves, North Cape May, February 6, 2011

Every year, every single year, this surprises me.

So long as I see myself as an organism, a being distinct from the world around me, I suppose it will.  I need to work on that.

In the meantime, though, I'll bask in the joy that suffuses my soul when I see the year's first crocus stand erupting from the earth.

Photo by us.

Crocuses and clams

We're a few weeks away from the crocuses. They know the sun is coming back. I do not know how they know but they do. Soon green fingers will break through the corms.

Meanwhile, my clams have settled in for the winter. Not deep, maybe 2 or 3 inches deeper than July, but still deeper, clammed up tight, waiting for the water to warm. Deep for a clam, though.




We still have a few stalks of Brussels sprouts growing, still with a few tiny sprouts left.

At this moment, the tide is just starting to rise again on the mudflats, under a crescent moon dancing between wintry clouds low in the west. The clams are there, under the black water glistening from the sliver of moonlight, as they have been before we came, as they will be when we're gone.

In a few more hours, a few feet of water will rise over the clams, then recede again before dawn.

***

We can teach about tides and the moon, we can talk of gravity, but until a child wrestles a clam from the mud, she knows nothing about them.

Most of what we teach, or pretend to teach, means nothing to a child, but often, sadly, nothing to the teacher as well.

I know of tides, but not the taiga or the tiger.

I know of quahogs, and reasonably well, but my words and pictures cannot replace an afternoon on the mudflats, the pungent sweet smell of life mingling with death, jolting young noses more familiar with Amber Romance and Axe.

A single afternoon on the flats can be ruined if I emphasize the abstract, especially to a generation that knows only the abstract. So I will pretend to care about mantles and siphons and the economic importance of hard shell clams while I hope that a few of the children get curious about this unknowable universe we've kept hidden from them.

And for the next few weeks, I am trapped in their world, until the crocuses come back.

Thanks to PSE&G, about 150 young adults will get to spend a day on a tidal flat in May.

Crocuses

Less than an hour ago I found my first crocus spears of the season, one even poking through the snow.

I wrote this February 16, 2004. This post is for me. Again, the crocus rises.

I tend to mark the seasons by plants. Some connections are obvious, strawberries and honeysuckle in June, apples and pumpkins in October. After the hard freeze in November, time seems to stop. By January, even kale has given up the ghost. By then, I no longer notice.

Deep winter, rhythms cease. Some of us lose our way. Age teaches me little but patience; sometimes that is enough.

Now in mid-February the ground remains frozen, and will be for another month. In a week or so, however, impossibly green slivers of grass-like leaves will break through the ice, marked with silver stripes down their middle. And in two weeks, egg-shaped cups of purple and yellow and white will flare open with the sun, exposing bright yellow stamens, the first smell of sex since the world died.

Crocuses flower from February to April--the earliest flowers defy logic, brilliant bursts of color calling bees still slumbering in hives.

By this time of year, I have just about given up on prayer. Nothing seems possible. This early bright drop of color reminds me just how little I know.

And here they are, back again.