Been thinking about…Brittle willows

Yellow sun and yellow willow catkins sway after the spring thunderstorm. Afternoon sun lights silver rivulets beneath. A burly bumblebee crawls over thick pollen, engrossed in something akin to happiness. Springtime is here in the middle of America, just as it has been uncountable times over. The willows are new and young and ready once more.

The silver clouds are wings in the south night sky, clouds barely visible even as the rain clears, even as the rain wings eastward again, as it always does. The long highway south is just a series of red taillights, sentinels moving onward, lines of lives and lifetimes and ideas lost in thought and space. Red lights disappear over the mountain.

Towering dark hospital stands watch over rooms shadowed and quiet, save for the beeping of machines. Some first moments are always the last, always and again. It’s always someone else in places like this, at least until it isn’t. Time wheels in mortality beneath the dimmed florescent lights, soft footsteps muffled on impersonal white tile. Not here, not like this, not in such a season of such life blooming outside in the spring. The juxtaposition is too great to consider.

The great willow tree just west of the house was my friend and is now just another death in the long past. A death that came after a long, hard drought. A friend reduced to dry stumps, the place once dappled beneath a sky of weaving branches, suddenly too-bright beneath a too-hot sun. Some deaths linger longer than others, but we don’t talk about grief like that. Brittle, dead limbs still littered the space, even near the honeysuckle and rhubarb, for some years after. A hard reminder, lessons of childhood droughts. The heart hardens.

Growing up does strange things. Responsibility, yes, but then the things of which we barely speak. Dragons and demons and hardness of heart, blind and blithe in the broken busyness of it all. Callousness turns to the brittle, our compulsion to protect the most important thing — the heart — turns that which is protected into the thing which is cut off from its own life blood. We also become brittle things weathering our own personal droughts.

Strange thoughts for such a beautiful Saturday in May. My reverie is broken by yet another car driving too fast, driver too distracted to handle the curving roads. Modernity meets mountain here in this place, another car leaning into my lane, oncoming. I swerve, and the oncoming driver flies by, perhaps oblivious to the danger. The energy of this time and moment and place is strange, whatever the reason. Perhaps another weird moon, or Mother’s Day, or an earth resonance, maybe the celestial bodies or just plain old barometric pressure shifts. Whatever the reason, people are too distracted for their own good.

Self-awareness is hard. Living our lives on the inside, it’s hard to know and see that which is the closest. But deep within, I contend the clock can, in some way, be turned back. I’ve seen it on the faces and written on the hearts of the elderly who aren’t really old after all. Those are the ones I want to learn from, those who seem young regardless of year or narrative or chronology.

Some societies revered the aged, but reverence is a two-way street. Some societies taught each generation to age with grace and wisdom, with an embrace of humility and a readiness to put in the hard work first, to pay the hard prices early, to yet nourish the mind and soul. To reject the powers all around us looking to reduce each of us to thoughtless commodities, that is a choice that demands heart and soul indeed. It’s a tough call but the only one I know that brings life back into the brittle.

Yellow sun and yellow willow catkins sway after the spring thunderstorm. Afternoon sun lights silver rivulets beneath. A burly bumblebee crawls over thick pollen, engrossed in something akin to happiness. Springtime is here in the middle of America, just as it has been uncountable times over. The willows are new and young and ready once more.