Arboretum Diary

"Living down in the country again. A wonderful conjunction of all that goes to make those sometime miracle-hours after sunset – so near and yet so far. Perfect, or nearly perfect days, I notice, are not so very uncommon..." – Whitman, from "Hours for the Soul"










6-14


Hours of the soul are by the lushness of recent rain, and the full maturity of so many prairie plants and flowers, as only a week has passed since last through this path, and the entire world of green has risen and taken hold where only a month ago a prairie burn had flattened the landscape, left it charred, short and homogenous.  The morning by the luck of sunlight on such days is the truest of gifts. As one person might send a long a card with a token of gratitude inside it, say, a locket, or a

letter, the morning here at the arboretum, as a short and shifty breeze scuttles along the bluestem and shakes things the leaves of the oaks as if by the slightest of nudges, is a gift only if we allow it to be that.  To walk along the narrow paths that are now virtually swept by the prairie grasses, the soft sweep over the legs are gift.  Add another by the hiding forget me nots, near the soft creek, in a near squat close to ground to the purple spiderwort – is it white wintergreen? – and wild blue phlox.

Mating dragonflies rise up from out of the crowded lot of green to dive and duck as if to inspect all new comers then off again as fast.  At the moment when the sight and sound and smell and temperature come together there is only the lost machinery of mind that tries to hold an old grip but then the pollinating bumblebee skips across the white puffs of flowers unknown. Back in Colorado the subalpine world was all of craggy rock or elfin trees, aspen and Douglas fir, the Indian paintbrush,

as one walked out onto balded points reaching into air toward a valley showering a creek. Here at the arboretum is a study in low lands that stem and fruit from earth's bubbling springs.  The mind's eye, then, becomes a counter of contrasts between the elevations at mountains and marsh and everything in between.  The air we breath the simplest gift, what swings wild in the transparency the mystery to seek.