Category Archives: Meditations

Winter: dark, wet, and green

By now, the sun had gotten about as low in the sky as it will get. We will lose a few more minutes of daylight between now and the winter solstice, but it almost won’t be noticeable.

Over the weekend, we got some more rain, not a great deal of it, but enough to make a difference to growing plants. While the hillsides still look brown, there are even more tender green shoots coming up in odd places.

Mass American culture tells us that spring is associated with tender green shoots and lengthening days. But that’s not the way the seasons work here. Right now, our days are short, and at the same time we have tender green shoots coming up. We don’t dash through the snow to get to grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving; we dash through rain showers and greenery. The Advent or Yule season is dark, just as it is throughout the northern hemisphere, but it is also wet and green. Mass American culture stems from North Atlantic culture, but parts of it just don’t apply to the Pacific Rim.

Waiting for winter

After the rain we had in October, little green plants started springing up in all kinds of places. In front of our house, the ground between the sidewalk and the road turned from barren beaten-down earth to little delicate green plants in the days after the rainstorms. In our front garden, the fennel roots put out fuzzy little green leaves a couple of inches long. Along the railroad tracks, a few green shoots started showing in among the golden brown stalks from last winter’s now-dead plants.

We haven’t had any significant rain since then. Those little green plants have gotten a little larger, but not by much. There they sit, waiting for the next big rain storm so they can grow a little larger.

Fall color in Palo Alto

That’s the office wing here at church, with roses in full bloom in the foreground, while at the same time leaves on trees and shrubs are turning bright red and orange. The recent rains and humidity have made the grass look much greener (in-ground sprinklers just aren’t as effective as rain).

(My office is the one with the lights on.)

Clouds

The clouds have been thick and dark today; and while we have seen a little bit of sun now and then, the clouds have persisted all day. In the summer, we may get morning fog that blots out the sun, but it generally clears away in the afternoon; but winter clouds don’t disappear by midday. It was supposed to rain today; it hasn’t yet, at least not where I am; but it does feel like the summer dry season is slowly winding down.

Watching for winter-wet season

I’ve been reading Gary Snyder’s most recent book of essays, Back on Fire (2007). In a couple of the essays, Snyder talks about the two seasons in the Mediterranean-type climate of much of California: there’s the summer-dry season, and the winter-wet season.

It has been odd for me, having recently moved from the south coast of Massachusetts, to hear people in California talk about seasons. We had a cool day a couple of days ago, and I overheard someone in the supermarket say to the cashier, “Fall is finally here.” It doesn’t feel like autumn to me. Autumn means a killing frost, and a changing weather pattern that includes more rain storms, and wide variations between warm and cold. We have not had a killing frost here, nor an increased incidence of rain storms; the earth, where it hasn’t been watered by in-ground irrigation systems, is still hard and parched and cracked dry, and the grasses are still dry and crisp, and the fire danger (as it is every summer in California) is still very high. We are not experiencing autumn here yet; we are still in the summer-dry season.

Somewhere in one of the essays in Back on Fire, Snyder says people living in California should abandon the kind of lawns and landscapes that require heavy water usage in the summer — practices that have been imported from the “Atlantic coast,” says Snyder; although these practices are really indigenous to the English climate, because even on the Atlantic coast lawns need heavy irrigation in the summer in order to stay green. But as a poet, Snyder also gives us new language, so that we can start thinking and acting in new ways. The English language has names for four seasons: winter, spring, summer, autumn or fall; these words come from the land where the English language began. In New England, most years have five seasons: winter, spring, summer, fall, Indian summer; we had to invent a new term for that season between fall and winter when the leaves have all fallen and weather gets warm again and there is still plenty of fresh food for humans and other animals to eat. In this bioregion of California, west of the crest of the Sierras, there are just two seasons, which Snyder calls summer-dry and winter-wet; to try to impose the old English terms for the four English seasons is a kind of self-delusion.

So it does not feel like autumn yet, because there is no autumn here, not really. Winter-wet has not yet begun; the hills are still brown, the trees are dull and faded green; we are still waiting for the first big rain storm of the new season. Yet here near the Pacific coast, we can feel that the weather pattern is changing; the fog is not reliable as it is in the middle of the summer-dry season. (And maybe here we need to add a third season to Snyder’s two, because Snyder lives up in the foothills of the Sierras where there is no summer fog. Maybe we need to talk about a summer-fog season which precedes the real summer-dry season; but I haven’t lived here long enough to be able to say.) We’re still in summer-dry season, but winter-wet season is just around the corner.

Two moments

I’m at a minister’s retreat, which is being held in a camp and conference center located on a steep ridge forested with second-growth redwoods, California bay laurels (Umbellularia californica), and Canyon live oak (Quercus chrysolepis). Two moments from today:

As I was walking along an old logging road cut into the steep hillside, with a precipitous drop on my right side and a vertiginously steep slope on my left side, I startled a big brown juvenile bird hawk. It flew quickly and efficiently through the redwood trees, out over the valley to my right, and was gone in less than a minute. I can’t tell you what kind of hawk it was (Accipiter cooperii?), but I saw it for just long enough to give me a new understanding of the topography of the landscape: the hawk was not limited to roads cut into a hillside otherwise too steep for me to walk on; it wove through a band of tall trees into the open air of the valley.

At tonight’s worship service, I could not pay attention to the sermon. I heard enough to know that it was a pretty good sermon, but that’s all; the words were gone before my tired brain had time to recognize them. I sat there watching other people listen to the sermon, and from their reactions — their bodily stillness, their facial expressions, their lack of fidgeting — I got some of the meat of the sermon.

Random toy memories

During a break today, I got up to take a walk around the block.I passed by a school with a sandbox in which there were a couple of toy dump trucks made out of metal. suddenly, I remembered an old toy I had once had, a metal Jeep — just like the old Jeeps you see soldiers driving in the old movies about the Second World War — a toy Jeep that was probably made by the Tonka Toys company. I remember that old toy Jeep could go anywhere, at least in my imagination. I had a GI Joe doll that I would sometimes try to put in the Jeep, but since GI Joe’s knees didn’t bend, that wasn’t very satisfying. GI Joe lived in a shoe box down in the basement, and in the show box he had a number of outfits. The only outfit I remember was his winter outfit: a set of skis, and all-white clothes. Somehow, that captured my imagination; in my memory, I can only remember playing with GI Joe in the summer time, when I would think how much fun it would be to take him outside in his ski outfit and set him loose on the snow. When I got older, I did get interested in winter camping, and somehow I feel that playing with that old GI Joe doll and his ski outfit was one of the things that got me interested in winter camping. Twenty years after I stopped playing with GI Joe and the Jeep, I was a Boy Scout leader, and one winter we took the boys on a winter backpacking trip in the White Mountains. It was one of the best outdoor trips I’ve ever taken — sharing with a bunch of boys the beauty of the mountains in the winter, the joy of hiking when the air is hovering just above zero but you’re working so hard you only have to wear an undershirt, the thrill of challenging yourself physically and mentally.

Monday evening en route to Millbrae

I’m trying very hard to cut down on my driving, so when I needed to go to Berkeley last night, I decided to take CalTrain commuter rail to the Millbrae station, and transfer there to BART for the rest of the trip.

After we left the San Mateo station, we were scheduled to go express to Millbrae, so I got up to stand near the doors. Not far from the San Mateo station, the train came to a dead stop. I looked out the window, and we weren’t near any station.

Then one of the train crew made an announcement over the public address system: “Ahh, we are stopped here because the train has just hit a white male,” he said. His voice sounded a little unsteady. “We’ll have to stay here until the police come….” The man was under the fifth car of the train.

I sat back down again. Years ago, I was on the train heading into Boston when the train hit someone, and we had to wait for over an hour before we got going again. I remembered hearing then that the police treated the train as a crime scene, which they had to document before the train could move again.

I sat and read a book. Every once in a while, a member of the train crew would walk up or down the aisle with expressions that ranged from blank to unhappy and sick at heart. After a while, I saw police and EMTs walk by. They did not hurry, so I assumed the man was dead. A member of the train crew announced that we would have to wait for the coroner to come and make his investigation. We waited. A couple of southbound trains passed on the other track; there had been no trains moving at first, but now the dispatcher was letting the southbound trains go. I saw more police walk by, and a couple of people with the word “Sheriff” on the back of their shirts. We waited. I saw Amtrak personnel (I guess Amtrak had the contract to run CalTrain’s service) walked by, wearing hard hats and carrying clipboards.

Around me, people were talking. You could tell that we were all thinking about the recent spate of CalTrain suicides, and we were all thinking that this must have been another suicide. Some northbound trains passed us on the other track. Finally, more than an hour after we had stopped, the announcement came that we had a new train crew on board — presumably the other train crew had to stay to answer police questions — and we got underway.

I felt crummy the rest of the evening. It was like passing a really bad accident on the highway, only worse because I was pretty sure that whoever had died had committed suicide. In a way, committing suicide by throwing yourself under a train is an incredibly selfish thing to do — from the expressions of the CalTrain crew, you could tell that they were sickened by what had happened. And what a horrible way to go. I couldn’t get rid of the bad feeling all evening.