June Light

Addendum #45

I lie in bed and await the dawn. I don’t look at the clock. I savor the quiet and the feeling building within me. The advance toward the solstice of the evermore light-filled days has awed me since I was a child. I understand the phrase “awe-struck,” because the feeling is like that, the feeling of being struck in one’s tiny life by this enormous conjunction of Earth and Sun. “I” must be “I,” as I lie in my bed, a lone breathing body beside another breathing body, but so much more is occurring. Then, as the light begins to sift into the room, I fall back asleep. The day, however, is before me, a day marked by the fullness of that vast yet tender light.

The plants, shrubs, and trees share my ardor. May and June are the months that many of them put in the growth that is part of the cycle that will get them through the winter. I can see and feel that intensity. My wife and I are gardeners and the warm months are devoted, in large part, to being with the green world. Our little backyard is virtually all garden and the front of the house has two gardens. To see everything grow from year to year gives us inspiration we never seem to tire of. The green world is so sturdy yet fragile, so full of an energy that the naked eye intuits from day to day but remains elusive. I think of how various educators have stressed how important it is for children to learn to garden and to be with the green world in an intimate way. Sadly, this is rare and, indeed, preposterous to those who insist on practicality and more practicality. One wonders what is more practical than learning to appreciate what keeps us alive and what teaches us, at summer’s end when the frosts come, about death and the great wheel of being. Our linear thinking is delusive. For all our insistence on adding up our years, we are bound to the pageant the green world enacts and that the June light exemplifies.

It seems fair to say that our machine-driven lives have changed our sense of what it is to be alive on Earth. Machines are closed units that do what they are supposed to according to how they have been engineered and manufactured. When they break we fix them or, more commonly, throw them out, though since they are inorganic their dissolution, particularly though not exclusively in regard to plastic, is problematic. Plants are organic and part of an overall process that has to do with the sources of life on Earth. You don’t fix a plant. It doesn’t break. You can tend it but that’s a very different story from taking care of a machine. A plant is alive. A modern machine is dependent on some fuel. All this goes without saying but if you live, as we do, in a society dominated by machines, a society where our metaphors for how we live are often taken from machines, our outlook becomes mechanical and oriented to linear progress as represented by one technological “breakthrough” or another, breakthroughs that have to do with corporations making money. The acceptance that the green world asks of us, since the forces are much larger than any mere person, is anathema to the manufactured world that is based on endless wanting, manipulation, and production, a herky-jerky way of living that goes with one product-desire becoming another, with turning machines on and off, with getting in and out of cars. You don’t turn a plant on or off. You may pull it up and throw it on the compost heap or transplant it but you don’t turn it on or off. A world resides in that difference, a world that highlights a deep steadiness in contradistinction to an anxiety that insists it knows what it is doing, as in “See, I turned the machine on. I’m in control.”

It seems a law of sorts that the more machines we have, the more conceited we become, which means, given the prevalence of electronics, gadgets, labor-saving devices, and vehicles in our lives, we are very conceited. Perhaps, as it is with the machines, we take that conceit for granted; perhaps, as with the current president of the United States, we double down on it. Were someone to say to Donald Trump, “So what do you actually know about those machines that inform your days?” the answer would probably be a short one, assuming you could get an answer. Or a question would come back: “Why does it matter?” Clearly, it doesn’t, if we are nothing but more or less thoughtless users. Almost by definition, as we move from task to task or distraction to distraction, we are alienated from the living planet except for random moments when we notice the sky or a breeze or it rains and we don’t want it to rain. That June light that I adore can be assumed and passed over. Any glimmers of reverence can be dismissed as inconsequential if not pagan. The quiet determination of the green world and the light that feeds that world go unremarked.

A man in my neighborhood, a runner, died recently while running, a man in his early 50s and a beloved member of the community. Many people were struck by the unwieldy grief such a sudden death precipitates. I saw him sometimes when I was walking our dog. He always had a smile and a wave, one of those people well-disposed to this world. His death and the coming of the solstice make me feel the powerful rush of time, how the days, as Charles Bukowski once put it, run away like wild horses over the hills. The stillness of the light feels cautionary, be it early morning or bright noon or the lingering dusk that becomes night. Each day is our fortune, lament and praise so inextricably braided.