Posts Tagged ‘california sycamore’
the green fuse
originally posted January 3, 2009
because I am a sensitive nature-loving type of female, I decided that today I had to go out to the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden to see the native plants sprouting after the first few rains of the season; but despite being rima the bird girl and all that, I also need to buy some jeans, so I stopped by the mall first; and because I am a doofus, I forgot to bring spare batteries, and so my camera quit on me soon after I finally arrived at the garden, with my nerves jangling from the mall. nobody emerges from buying jeans with their self-esteem totally intact.
the garden was very nice, especially after I was forced to put away my now-dead camera and just sit for a while under an arbor covered in native grapevines. the bench I was sitting on was a memorial to somebody, and bore this inscription: “She cleared her mind and filled her heart.”
among the agaves, I’m not sure which kind since the label was missing, but I believe they were shaw’s agave, I saw one getting going with a flower stalk:
whenever I see an agave doing this I always think of Dylan Thomas -
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
you do not, perhaps, need to be too well-versed in the ways of plant sex to look at this and guess that it is somehow both ecstatic and painful. and in fact it is also an act of destruction as well as creation. the original plant will die after it gives the last full measure of devotion and puts out the flower. but there will usually be new sprouts around it to carry on.
it was so socked-in with clouds today, raining a bit off and on, that I didn’t get any good shots of the San Gabriel Mountains looming in the background, the source of so much of the violence and beauty, the creation and destruction we experience down below in the valley. if you ever wonder why western sycamores are shaped so strangely, it is partly because they are prepared at any time to be knocked askew by a flood coming down from the mountains; if they wind up sideways or upside down after the flood, they will just go on growing in a new shape.
I sat on my bench reading the book I had just bought in the gift shop, and read this: “Fall is the time of waiting for rain, which translates into Spanish as esperando la lluvia. The verb esparar, with its double meaning of “to wait” and “to hope,” is particularly appropriate for this renaming: Esperamos la lluvia, we are waiting, and hoping, for rain.”
the rain started again as I was driving away, hitting my windshield as it occurred to me what I had been trying to understand all day: by the time I realize that change is coming, it’s already here.
