Reading the Room Now
The perennial chives that grow in our home garden, just for us and for the lady bugs who crawl at their feet, they are ten inches tall already. It's St.Pats...not Mother's Day! But I'm reading the room and our sentries of spring are telling the story of the soil belowground. Chives, the flowering bulbs, the grass growing long enough to conceal the slip-ons that Jack kicked off to chase the cat, they are all emblems of the warming soil temperatures and the network of life at work below our surface. Pay heed not to the calendar, but to the testimony of the chives, to the climb that they've made despite the date. That old wife who suggested May 15th for a last frost date in our neck of the woods, what does she make of this? Would she revise her suggested planting dates in consideration of the signals from the flowers and the early nesting birds?
Whether or not she adapts to the conditions, it's about time I read the room. So often I am feverishly chasing an idea of my own. Meanwhile, all the world around me sighs from my lack of consideration. There is a whole world story unfolding, which I belong to and wake to every morning. With so many moving parts, I am a citizen of it like the rest and rather than forging my way across the current, I could take a page out of Rich's book. He is such an observer, and in this metaphor he sits on the side of the stream in observance before finding his best way to float with it. I seem to be drawn to people like that, and maybe it's because I aspire to do the same: to familiarize myself with the subject, the complement, and the setting before I write the verb that completes my sentence. It makes it worth reading and worth contributing to the plot.
Working with this land reinforces that approach to life. If I was to disregard the cues around me in an attempt to enforce my plan A for the field this season, we would struggle and learn the hard way from Mother Nature to pay more attention. My planner tells me it's time to plant spring peas and yet the ground has hardly absorbed all the rain that fell at the end of last week plus what fell this past weekend. The seed would have a real chance to prosper if I waited until the soil was not saturated, and was ready to receive and give home to new life. And so like the kestrel on the wire that overlooks the field, we sit and wait until it's time. This incredible bird reserves so much energy for the right moment when it puts forth incredible effort to capture the rogue vole that crosses its field of vision. But the vast majority of its time is spent in watch, making far fewer moves than I do to see a plan to fruition.
The kestrel has sharp instincts and the existential need to survive in the wild world. Maybe it's simpler in that world, where you spend the entirety of the day securing your basic needs, where wasted energy could prove fatal. In that light, it's a luxury to live a human existence, at the top of the food chain. Each day presents considerable latitude by which we can live our lives. We are free to direct our energy where we would like, endowed with autonomy over animal instinct. And if abused, that freedom allows us to make life more complicated than it is.
We simply need to wait our turn to jump in. And when we do, my favorite tendrilly spring veggies have their best chance of coming to fruition, bearing loads of snow peas for harvest; I don't wear myself ragged, trying to fix problems that are out of my control; and we find satisfaction in our flow, pleasantly surprised by the fact that not only is life more pleasant when we take the time to read the room, but we also somehow manage to achieve better results doing less, smarter work. It's almost as if what will be will be and that we aren't the Pagemaster of this story, but just characters traversing it.
Thank you for reading :).
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