Repeat, with a difference

I have no idea how long it takes for a crocus seed to develop into a bulb capable of flowering.  I have no idea if the croci I’ve been planting have been genuinely fruitful and getting on with the multiplying thang.  The purple ones come up in little purple clumps; the yellow ones are merrily glowing away…there might be a few stripey ones due to erupt elsewhere, but they are doing as they have done, each year, unless thwarted by spade, rabbit, or drought.

If I want difference in the crocus department, I’m going to have to plant some other species [the saffron-bearing variety keeps intriguing me — imagine being able to present Word with our own saffron to put in the Lucia buns?], or I’m going to have to be really patient.

For some reason, I’m more patient with the slow growth of bulblets than I am with the glacial progress of insight among my fellow human beings.  If you are not getting the results you are hoping for, you need to STOP DOING WHAT YOU’VE BEEN DOING and try something else.  The ‘reset’ button only gets you back to your original parameters; if those were screwy, what evolves out from them is still going to be warped, tangled, tainted, and whatever other forms of WRONG one might recognize from the first 18 times the tune has played out.

<sigh>

The wiser form of hope, it seems to me, is to leave, strike out for elsewhere, and learn what it has to offer for a while.  Distance, time, and new habits may be the salve for all that repetitive injury — Over time you end up being someone slightly Other than you were, and in the process, when you finally look back, your otherwise eyes may be able to see a path that leads forward, and not back into pain.

Maybe.  I don’t think it works if you are insistent on being who you were to the exclusion of all other possibilities.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

                                                — T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

Read Full Post »

Unreasonable weather

I should not be able to go weeding on a bright February morning.  The frost should be hard, a bug-and-blight-killing cold, and the drainage trough in the alley should shimmer with thin plates of translucent ice.

Instead, I have daffodils coming up in the front yard, and the bulbs I’m supposed to be chilling outside to be forced in March are already thinking about bolting outside.

[These are not statements of blame, just frustration.  There are so many other forms of strangeness and uncertainty going around my life at the moment that it would have been nice to have something like the cycles of the year to rely upon.]

No, this wasn't taken this morning....

Read Full Post »

Must remember to get aconite bulbs

Back north, the witch hazels are blooming, and the first aconites are popping up around the woodlands.  [sigh] I typed that sentence around New Years’, and didn’t post because there hadn’t been any aconite sightings around here.  But yesterday that changed — Hurrah!

  They’re just so cheerful,with their bright petals and green Kermit frills.  We used to have drifts of them skittering around the rocky hillside and across the front yard — just a brief flash of gold, when everything was white or crumbly brown.  They’d fade out just as the pink violets began to bloom.

Now there are just these few, hiding beneath the skeleton of last year’s Baptisia, and maybe a few lurking beneath the shrubs out front.  Ah well.  It’s something.  Even tiny bits of splendor are worth waiting for.

 

 

Read Full Post »