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Two Views of Snow
Above is a pretty-as-a-picture picture from the Ramble, above the waterfall where the Gill flows into the Lake. I'm not really looking for post card style effects, but the fresh snow seems to embellish every view, and if "pretty" is your default, why fight it? The Fifth Avenue façade below, seen, through wind blown flakes, from Pilgrim Hill, captures the actual feeling of being in the weather a little better.
The Same, But Different
These pictures of the Gill (the stream that runs through the Ramble) were taken five days apart; the second while the snow fell on 1/20, our first significant accumulation since 1996. Now we have even more. I guess I asked for it. The snow is a good thing. It provides protection and insulation, and when it melts, virtually all of the moisture is absorbed into the ground. The Park is so heavily used that soil compression is a big problem. It's packed so hard that much of the rainwater is shed as run off; eroding rather than nourishing. Snowmelt is much more efficient.
Not so good is the ice that came with the latest storm. Glaze storms (the proper term, forget the movie) do terrible damage to trees. Already brittle in the cold, twigs, limbs, and even trunks, snap under the added weight. The accumulation didn't look too bad in the afternoon, but may have worsened overnight. I'll look for damage this weekend. It should be minimal, since the cold stretch leading up to the storm should have forced the flora into full dormancy by now. If these temperatures were to occur during the Summer, most trees would be killed; like hibernating animals, they slow their metabolic processes to achieve Winter hardiness. In the wild, this would all be business as usual, but in the Park, every bit of damage is a real loss. Natural regeneration just doesn't get a fair chance to play out, and even though the Park is well tended, we lose venerable trees too often. Replacements are planted, but won't achieve the same degree of character for at least a generation (in human terms).
Cold enough for you?
My favorite answer is always “no, I like it about three degrees colder”, but you probably have your own riposte. No denying the cold, though; it’s sharp as any wit. Maybe it’s my asceticism, but I’m sort of enjoying it. I lament the Winter during every other season, the same way one worries about death only while living, (no authority on that one), but once it arrives, I find myself embracing this season of retraction. It’s as engaging as reality always is, or at least has the potential to be. The potential is realized through attention. Through repeated perception, I’ve realized that the cold is a good thing. The ground is hardening. Trees are protecting themselves, and resting. A heavy snow would top things off nicely.I’m convinced that the mild winters of the last couple of years have accelerated deterioration in the Park. The unfrozen ground suffers more damage, and bears less protective vegetation. In my recent walks, I’ve often felt that I was aggravating a sore spot with my tread. Much of the landscape seemed raw and exposed. We’ve bobbed along on the surface of Winter; a day in the twenties, another near sixty. This prolonged stretch is finally allowing cyclical seasonal habits to assert themselves.
I took a walk through low degrees, and it was beautiful. Sunny, without much wind, if you dress right, it’s painless. Well, it was painless until I slipped on a slope, and twisted my knee. That frozen ground is unforgiving. Actually, I got disoriented shifting between binocular, camera and naked eyesight, amid the steeply tilted facets of the Ramble. A binocular makes you step forward, a camera, backwards. It’s easy to lose track of your feet, when you focus your attention through a prosthetic lens. It does bring home how provisional, and non-definitive, our vision is. The binocular reveals so much that it’s well worth the effort. The camera’s utility is less immediate, and it introduces Uncertainty Principle effects into the self documentation equation. By trying to record or communicate the nature of my experience of the Park, I change it, and risk losing sight of what it was that brought me here to begin with. And I keep trying to take pictures with the binocular. Some things just can’t be recorded, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen. I guess that’s my challenge in attempting this page.
Anyway, I just kept going on my sprained knee; typical macho Goddess worshiper. I’ve been limping, but improving daily. Now there are photos to deal with. We should have some relief from all this text around here soon, and with it, more specificity. As I write this, three to five inches of snow is predicted for tomorrow. I fear I won’t be able to check it out until Saturday, but the temperature’s not supposed to get above freezing, so it should stick around. Still, snow is best when fresh. There’s always my lunch hour...
Martin Luther King Day
This is our newest official holiday, the only one I have seen instituted in my lifetime. Though I am an advocate of Tradition, this day provides a chance to focus on the limitations of traditional views, and our abilities to improve them. Today’s emergent spirituality is genuinely conservative, in that it seeks to preserve supra-cultural technologies of transcendence, which go back to prehistory. If these practices have been lost, displaced by cultural devices whose potency is more symbolic than practical, then our effort is one of recovery, not maintenance, and hence is also radical; “of the root”. Even a radical conservative, however, must not suppose that there are not important lessons taught in modern parlance.In honor of the occasion, I give you the dark-eyed junco, a relative of the sparrows, and a ubiquitous presence in Central Park during the Winter. This little bird is notable as an example of folk taxonomy, which is to say Traditional, as opposed to scientific, distinction. Our eastern “slate colored” type looks quite different from its western counterparts, and the various birds were always known by different names. Observers in the field have traditionally recognized them as different species, based on differences in appearance. Formalized observation (and now genetics), has shown, however, that the types interbreed where their ranges overlap, and ornithologists have combined the group into a single species. The regional variants are now considered subspecies, a term which is replacing the heavily freighted word formerly given to groups differentiated by superficial characteristics: the word “race”.
We are all the same, yet we are all different. This is a basic Mystery of Life. We know that, as a species, we are one, with an existence that transcends the individual, but our experience is of separation and individuation. I wrote, in my New Year’s piece, that “identity’s a tragedy, but it’s what we have”. Differentiation is the result of the Fall, which I identify with the Big Bang, and with the Gnostic vision of Creation. Our purpose is to return to unity, to connect every point, all at once, but our route must take us through these differences, which, along the way, we find cause to celebrate. Nevertheless, the separation of black from white is of the same order as the separation between individual and society, or between each of us and God.
Such is the nature of racial identity; it is a mystery, and so, a microcosm of The Mystery. We are a racist society to the degree that we believe that race is a distinction we should make, not to the degree that we find we can’t help but make it.
Finding paths through such a conceptual briar patch is spiritual work. Politicians can only follow after, and those who go first will be most torn by thorns. If others were sacrificed before and after him, Dr. King remains a fitting index of the cause commemorated in his name. The mobilization of social willpower through moral imperative is the closest thing to a political idea that the twentieth century produced. He is the great American exemplar of the form; a worthy student of Gandhi. Their passive resistance marks the development of a politics of asceticism, and a move away from the specificity of issues, to the generality of justice. Dr. King built a coalition not by appealing to desire, but by demonstrating the propriety of his position, compelling agreement, wielding power without force. This passage of politics from the real to the ideational domain is a glimpse of a better future, and well worth a day off for the economy.
The juncos never take a day off. Just how much they distinguish is not clear, but like us, they are largely visual creatures. Still, at their margins, they seem not to discriminate, or rather, they see the commonality beneath their varied plumages. We who maintain their names may take a lesson from the birds: that if we watch, we must be prepared to learn.
Alternative Owl
The Village Voice is featuring the Cedar Hill owl, which I posted on the main page in November. Does A. otus have a press agent? Got to keep up with those celebrity hawks!Welcome to Winter
Winter arrives with the Holiday Season, and remains after the festivities are done. This is square one, from which the pattern must be rebuilt. Dormancy seems an attractive strategy. I certainly haven’t gotten enough rest lately. Holiday stress distracts. Duty and diversion turn us away. It’s amazing how easily I can forget my supposed preoccupation with the Park.Because the pattern is built of repetition, we can take it for granted, even as we move within it.
We move from season to season, year to year. The closer we are to nature, the less we remember. The pattern subsumes the particular, or vice versa. Either way, we lose distinction. Birth, Death, Decay, proceed as ever, without so much as a glance over the shoulder.
I was looking the other way when the new season entered. It’s awkward saying “the Winter of 1999-2000”, but there you have it; we don’t live in accordance with Earth’s pattern, so we misplace our demarcations. Crossing a border is not the same as ignoring one.
Winter will not be ignored. I was in the Midwest when it started, Detroit, anyway. It was truly cold, days struggling through the twenties, darkness bringing single digits. Lots of running from door to car, waiting for the air to warm, unstiffening slowly in the moving room that provides an essential head space for most of America. Driving is an ecstasy of sorts. The mind scrolls with the highway, while an automatic body guides the machine. The radio plays. 2AM, it’s “Michigan Outdoors”; talk of deer, concern over the declining numbers of young hunters. A disturbing statistic is cited: the average American spends only ten minutes a day outside. Michigan has outdoors all over the place, but it’s mostly viewed in passing.
Space is different in New York; attenuated, yet dense. I miss the open road through open spaces, but here, I walk. It’s better for the body, if lacking in velocity. Still, it drives the mind. Walking and driving, like other “mindless” actions, stimulate mentation. This function is not unrelated to various spiritual practices (spiritual technologies, so to speak); the repetition of a mantra, the counting of the rosary, the dancing of the dervish. All are unimportant, except as means of transporting consciousness elsewhere. So I take my body to the Park, and let it walk. After weeks of inattention, I don’t so much need to re-focus, as to un-focus. Who knows what may come into view?
There is both more and less to see in this season. Things are at their minimum, what with the retreat of foliage, the migrants gone, the hibernators hid. Underlying forms, however, are more visible than ever. No screens of green obscure the view. Again, space changes. The shapes, the angles, the way the land lays, now exposed. The limbs of trees reveal what leaves had shadowed. Winter is a great teacher; we learn the absolute requirements, the baseline for survival. There is less now, but there is enough.
There is always enough, and it is always available. That is the Tradition, that is the Promise. None of which means that it’s always easy to find. There is nothing easy about Winter.
January 6, 2000
Epiphany
The sixth day of January, the last of Christmas.The Holiday Season, in practice, ends with the blunt trauma of New Year’s Day, salved, perhaps, with a little football. Winter bleakly awaits. Dull days and slow fluids. Yet the Season extends: Tradition has it that on the twelfth day after the Nativity, wise men from the East arrived, guided by a star, bearing varied gifts. They certified the child’s importance.
Now that’s my kind of story!
I like the idea that the savior needs the endorsement of these exotic intellectuals.
Actually, the Magi serve as initiators, and presage Baptism, which is celebrated as Theophany, on the Sunday following Epiphany. Both words mean “manifestation”, as of the divine. The early churches associated these feast days with the celebration of the Nativity, and marked them, separately or simultaneously, anywhere from December 25th to January 6th. Also in the mix was a celebration of the water-into-wine miracle, and just to confuse matters further, the Julian/Gregorian calendar schism has continued to diverge, so that the Eastern Christians are now celebrating Christmas on January 7th. Thus the Christmastide ends in a welter of overlapping dates and symbols.
But end it does. There is some memory of the occasion left in contemporary practice, if only in the notion that decorations should come down by the 6th. (Capitalism can wring no more from the season, and discards it. Meanwhile, the start of the holiday is being signaled earlier each year, expanding the purchasing window.)
Yes, Christmas is truly over, which is to say, we now have perspective on it.
Looking back we see:
Birth. Baptism. Initiation. Manifestation.
All indicate attainment of a new status, and with it, revelation; the insight of a different viewpoint.
This the perspective of Epiphany, which, as attested by the associated Incarnation, is also the perspective of humanity: that we see a thing differently from within and without, that a change in perspective reveals our error, and that we thereby have the ability to correct ourselves.
Celebration of the holidays teaches us these corrections, and if we learn their lesson, we are changed.
Who among us would stay the same?
For the last time (this Season), Merry Christmas!