“‘Shall man then despair?’ he continued. ‘Is he not a sprout-land too, after ever so many searings and witherings?’ No doubt about it.”
– William Bryant Logan, quoting Henry David Thoreau
“The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.”
– Shunryu Suzuki
Feel your heartbeat and lift your head, friend. Look out to the far horizon, for the phoenix awaits. It is fire which does not consume, but gives flight to what is true; to what cannot die; to what was not born; to what gives you life in return for how you choose to recycle.
This essay’s purpose is to start your regen journey, now that the guild is over. We’ll do so by turning to the trees, and asking a man who cuts them for a living what they truly have to teach. Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees by William Bryant Logan is where we hope to catch a glimpse of Ether’s playful phoenix.
This is not a series of instructions. It is a web of co-relations. Kernel cannot tell you exactly how to regenerate your environment, but we can discover together why it is a virtuous goal.
‘Regen’ is neither regressive nor progressive. It does not make the twin mistakes of thinking we can conquer our environment, nor of imagining that we are separate from our environment and can return it to some pristine state by retracting our participation. There is no escape. There is no ‘right’ way. There is no ‘good’ solution. There are no righteous few. There is no ‘them’. There are none who are not complicit.
There is attention. There is awareness. There is thanksgiving. There is reciprocity. There is awe. There is humility. There is listening, learning, and love.
Regenerative play starts here and continues through craft and timing. These aspects of love pull us into closer and more adaptive relationships with the system we are regenerating and being regenerated by. To know the place of regeneration, and to place ourselves in the context of that regeneration, requires a blend of self-awareness, subject matter expertise, and a lovingly care-full disposition. This is exactly where Logan begins his surprising work:
“The old Indo-European for tree, varna, also means ‘to cut’. This language was spoken in the seventh millennium BC, and already embodied the idea that trees are to cut. In Europe, the cutting came to be called coppice–from Old French meaning ‘to chop’, that is, to cut with a blow.”
“It is a living cathedral dedicated to the power of sprouting. As often as you cut it, all by itself it grows its pillars again.”
So, we begin with what may seem like heresy: trees are for cutting. However, this does not give us a free licence, and it does not mean trees are for cutting in some existential sense. It means that our relationship with trees revolves around cutting, its right rhythm, and the sort of respect and reverence required for life to be continually revived in generation after generation.
This insight is not new. It is present in all traditions across the world (Kirtimukha embodies the same truth). It is given voice to most eloquently in our time by people like Robin Wall Kimerrer:
“In order to live, I must consume. That's the way the world works, the exchange of a life for a life, the endless cycling between my body and the body of the world [...] If we are fully awake, a moral question arises as we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own: how do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives we take?”
Right from the start, we must see this monstrous reality–life feeds on life to go on living–if we are ever to recreate a mature, honest, clear-sighted, and rhythmic relationship with ourselves and the worlds within which we exist. Knowing this, we know that we can neither go back to a pristine golden age, nor progress into technological utopia. This world is never-not-broken. Regens are not saviours. This world does not need more hubris, it calls for humility. Regens seek to heal our relationship to this world; and–at best–to cultivate our ability to be intimate with reality as it truly is. This is the seedbed of real art:
“To keep a coppice woodland is an art. Each of its woodsmen had a double aim: to renew the woods by harvesting wood [...] The dirt, the species, the sun, the water might all play a role. He had to respond to the whole landscape.”
It is not only right relationship to each part that we are concerned with here: it is our ability to respond to the whole, wholesomely.
“Harmony is not the right word to describe it. A better phrase is creative engagement. [Our ancestors] lived that way because they knew they had to, in order to live at all, and it was a good way to live, for both the people and the plants. In essence, they learned to talk to trees.”
These ancestors Logan references are not better, nor any worse, than us. They lived as they did because they had to, which is what we find ourselves still doing today. However, it is when this “has to” comes through creative engagement on our own terms that it leads us to a good life; lived in essential communion with the world of which we are a part, and which we each contain. Indeed, it is the very conscious choice to participate–which means to participate in the monstrous reality of life consuming life–which guides each and every step we take.
“The more the people cut, the more they learned; the more they learned, the more they could imagine. As we shall see, the idea of springtime turned upon coppice; the eight-hundred-year tradition of classical Japanese poetry did too [...] ‘The seeds of Japanese poetry,’ he said, ‘lie in the human heart, and they sprout the countless leaves of words.’”
This is just it: you cannot learn unless you take in the world. Taking in the world leads to heartfelt intimacy, and more wholesome response, for you come to realise that you are the world. Literally. Being this, you see things just as they are:
“One local jaban owner expressed astonishment that the scientists were surprised by this effect. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Farming always makes more trees grow.’”
If real learning is taking (part) in the world, it is no surprise that farmers in Africa know more than scientists about how farming and biodiverse forests are meant to coexist. It is this kind of tragi-comic moment which keeps us beginning again–as we always do in Kernel–with conversation:
“I had reminded myself and my crew that this was not a one-shot event but the beginning of a training process that would take a decade. The pollards could not all at once look like finished trees. We had to begin a conversation.”
When asked what comes after taking their turn in the dia-log (which here meant cutting trees for the Metropolitan Museum in New York) Logan answers simply and truly, “Silent prayer.”
Delightful Edge¶“A tree is in a forest, but there is also a forest in each tree.”
“The boundary between multiple intersecting worlds is the most interesting palace to be”, and a great part of the art of conversation with trees revolves around managing these edges carefully, dancing to the different music–birdsong, pollinators, livestock, flowers, brambles, and sprouts–which fills them in each season. Care for the edges is how one can create fractals; whether it is the care one takes to measure coastlines, or the care with which one cultivates sunflowers. Logan learns this repeatedly in all the different places he visits:
“It was a way to make edges, and edges within edges, multiplying the conditions in the landscape, so creatures that loved different habitats all could thrive. This landscape of dynamic edges has recently been dubbed satoyama, marking the interface between town and mountain.”
Logan’s description of how satoyama inhabit the intersections echoes another seminal text about Japan: The Mushroom at the End of the World. These boundaries, intersections and ‘broken’ places ask us: “how can we disturb the systems within which we live in generative ways? What kinds of trouble can we stir that might bring us greater intimacy, and cultivate our ability to respond with what Donna Haraway calls, ‘necessary resurgence’?”
These are not rhetorical questions. They cut right to the heart of who and what we think we are.
“The point is rather the one raised by Darwin. After he observed a colony of sea pens—colonial organisms each of whose rising fingers had its own mouth, body, and tentacles, but all of which moved as one and reproduced as one—he wrote, ‘Well may one be allowed to ask, ‘What is an individual?’”
It is at the edge where we meet others, and where otherness begins to break down in the face of an intimacy which does not seek to make right, but rather to be with:
“Real help comes from living with people, helping them to make their lives steadier, not by prescribing progress for them.”
“Trees are closer to God than we are and, in the anagogical sense, smarter.”
“The redwood forest is not pristine. It is rather the product of continual regeneration, unending succession. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘old growth.’”
“A coppice wood is not a single thing, but a synthetic ecosystem in which human participation is the key. Far more species of plants, insects, birds, and other creatures inhabit such a mixed landscape than would live in an untouched woodland. And the fact that it is cut in a rhythmic cycle keeps a living seed bank in the dirt and reassures a tremendous variety of animal life that it can safely live there as long as it pleases. A coppice is a continuing performance, a long-running show.”
What a clear statement of our stewardship! We are called to perform a critical role, and to do so in an ongoing fashion. The people whose language embodied a rhythmic relationship with cutting wood knew that “a healthy woodland was one in which they were active participants.” By virtue of actively taking part, they learnt how to do so with deeply grounded reason:
“Because they left the live roots in the ground, they prevented erosion. The landscape was not denuded because the trees sprouted back. Whole suites of creatures joined the rhythm of regrowth, colonising the coppice and pollard woods. The resulting lands were more diverse, not less.”
How and when to cut is not the only lesson imparted by trees. Once you know the reasonable approach and the right method–that is, as you acquire the skill, or virtuosity–you must simultaneously come to embody and live the underlying virtue:
“The most important thing that the trees taught people was to live in the presence of their days. You had to cut, all right, but you also had to know when to stop, and you had to learn how to wait before you cut again.”
This is the hardest part: knowing when to stop. Kernel’s last lesson gives a biological example of literally regenerative systems in axolotls that know how to stop irrespective of the extent of the damage which activates them. Stopping at the right time is the result of succinctness and a “rhythmic balance of the whole”. Logan–a seasoned pruner–knows how difficult this really is:
“Like all human activities, regenerative ways are deviled by temptation. A person may easily exchange love for power, the right thing for the thing that promises quick security. As Henry Nouwen wrote, ‘It seems easier to be god than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.’”
This entire guild is arranged to make you stop and see that “seems” clearly, for it is critical. It only seems easier to be god, to control, and to own. In truth, it is not about easy or hard, right or wrong, forwards or backwards. It is spontaneous and natural, when in direct contact with life, just to love God, to love people, to love life.
Living Resilience¶“The way trees sprouted when cut gave people an intimation of immortality [...] Phoenix regeneration is the name for this process. Potentially, every tree is immortal.”
“When Isaiah envisioned the coming kingdom, he sang that no child would die or old person not live out their days; rather, each would have the life of a tree. Job too saw it plainly: in chapter 14, as he demanded that God tell him why He had broken him, he complained that death simply puts an end to men. He wished he might have been a plant: ‘For a tree there is hope, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again and that its tender shoots will not cease. Even though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the dust, yet at the first whiff of water, it may flourish again and put forth branches like a young plant.’ Unlike a man, a tree could revive although it seemed to have died.”
Other parts of The Bible say that “the kingdom of God is within you.” So, which is it? Is it coming, or is it already here in your own heart of hearts? Of course, this is a reductive way to pose the question and, if we stop, we can see that when the kingdom is said to be “coming”, it serves as what we would today call an “attractor”. It incentivises action now for a future good (the kingdom of Heaven realised on Earth). Derrida says the same thing about hospitality, Human Rights, Justice and a “democracy to come”.
The problem is that it is hard to specify what future attractors like the “kingdom of Heaven realised on Earth” definitively mean in terms we all currently use. However, we now have a global computing fabric which is always and everywhere in consensus. This is an enormously powerful device for creating prosocial attractors which are able to specify the “future good” in deterministic terms we currently use and collectively act upon.
Vitalik and Karl Floersch recognised this some time ago. They called the idea Ether’s Phoenix. Simon de la Rouviere wrote about it when discussing “time-as-a-platform”, an extension of which you can find in the Kernel library.
Ether’s Phoenix is the idea that an abundant future of public goods will indefinitely and retroactively reward the contributors who helped create it. Moreover, as the Optimism team puts it in their blog linked above,
“It is also a mindset: that optimism prevails, that better systems are possible, and that humankind will be rewarded for its cooperative revolution.”
However, this section begins with quotes from Isaiah and Job for a good reason: even well-intentioned religions and traditions, who create potentially good future attractors can fail to move towards them over time. Something more than specificity in terms on which there is currently consensus and an optimistic mindset is required. Logan and the trees offer us a further consideration:
“The work in which head and heart and hand participate, at once, yields the only objective knowledge. It employs the ratiocinative capacity, the ability to discriminate and choose. It is driven by the wish to know. It is corrected, tempered and given form by work with the resistant materials of this world.”
It is not only mind. It is not only heart. It is not only hands. It is all three in concert, with reverence for this world as it is, and how it resists even the faintest glimmer of our own projections. Moreover, there is a tekne (both technique and art) to understanding how our present actions may affect the future. Such craft combines scientific knowledge, lived experience, and tender care. In attuning to the consequences of our actions, we are more capable of understanding what the right decision is, at the right time, in the right place.
“Truth, in biblical terms, is not a gold star on your notebook. It is an honest relationship between persons and the world around them, giving results that mirror an honorable intent. The prophet Isaiah made an equation between sprouting and farming on the one hand and right living on the other: ‘For as the soil makes the sprout come up and a garden causes seeds to grow, so the Lord will make righteousness and praise spring up before all nations.’ Right living was a response to God’s gifts.”
Once more, we do well to ask, ‘but what is this right living, deep down?’ for it has so often brought us dogmatic imposition, rather than neighbourliness. However, if we read carefully, we find one suggestion echoed again and again throughout Logan’s work. Right living is just “to live in the presence of our days.”
To live in the presence of our days. What a simple and enormous response this life asks of each of us.
“He showed how head, heart, and hand can make a full life out of unexpected materials, and how the difficult love of a place and its people can transform a person. In other words, his art was not the fruit of its practice alone, but of a fully lived life.”
“It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives.
Nourish it then
That it may leaf
And bloom
And fill with singing birds!”
– Black Elk
A man known as Black Elk would sometimes talk of the “green circle of this day”, or of how birds build their “nests in circles because theirs is the same religion as ours”. To him, there is something about living in the presence of our days which brings us full circle, which returns us home, which completes the sacred hoop he saw so clearly.
Logan’s words echo this older story as he reflects on how to draw a path which is neither progressive nor regressive, which simply sees things as they are: whole, complete, circular.
“If we are to get out of the dead end that our mastery of nature has backed us into, we will need to draw a much larger circle in time [...] You must use that stagnant point as the center and draw as large a circle as you can around it. That circle reaches much farther back in time, well beyond the short memory of the conservatives, and much farther forward, well beyond the sanguine hope of the progressives.”
This is the practical advice Logan gives each regen. Go back in time: go back with Graeber and Wengrow, and then go back even further. Go back as far as you can, through whatever stories and traces you have the skill and heart to track. But do not stop there. Come around and go forth. Dare to dream of what can be and _specify _how those far futures can pull us forward to meet them; how they can cause us to rise like a fire which does not consume, but calls you to pray with all that is. Now be present here. Humbled and wonderstruck, we can plant that living root still.
Neighbourhood Tune¶“What is above responds to what is below.”
Planting this sacred root is not some mystical activity separate from day-to-day life. It is that which sprouts anew right when we are present with our day as it is. This is a way of head and heart and hands in concert, which is not just about how we are, but how we live with others.
“We live not in a world of things, but of neighbors. Each neighbor responds to the others. The real question is not ‘How can I become more efficient and show better numbers?’ but rather ‘In what I am doing, am I a good neighbor or a bad?’”
“It occurred to me here that beauty was not in any one thing, but rather in the meeting of things. It arises where individuals become more the more they give. The trees and the people who pollarded them had this loveliness. So did the people who gave to one another what each possessed, in the name of moments to be created together.”
Moments created together, seeds planted to shade future generations, and circular time all come together at last in the living experience of music.
“Each plant plays its tune, the phrase that has characterized its kind for millions of years. No matter where its seed sprouts, each will try to play its melody.”
“Reiteration is the wonderful name that Oldeman gave the tree’s ability to respond to the world around it by in whole or in part replaying its melody, but in very different contexts at ever different scales. It is jazz: take the tune, stretch it, cut it into pieces, put them back together, transpose it up or down, flatten it out, or shoot it at the sky.”
When we pull this thread and reflect on the quality of the growing music all around us, we find that there are an endless list of reasons why specific tunes are called forth on different occasions and at different times:
“Because of the many accidents.
Because of the uncertain world.
Because of heat and cold, storm and wind, pests and diseases.
Because of neighbors, those that are rooted, and others that are two, four, six, and eight legged. Because of opportune openings to the sun.
Because of the subsequent improvisation.”
Finding all this and more, perhaps we can breathe out and give ourselves whole-heartedly to the melody which goes on giving all of this.
“Crown and root do not mirror but reflect each other, showing their similar idea and different execution.”
“Truth sprouts green from the ground, right living pours down from the skies.”
“In coppice and pollard, both people and trees were reciprocally active. One acted, and the other responded. When the parties listened and answered, the results created new possibilities for both. One party harvested for its needs, the other lived longer and continued indefinitely upon the land. The relationship cost a tremendous effort on the part of both.”
In some deep sense, trees teach us about the way in which we are responsible for helping the immortal live out its days. This eternally paradoxical call for reciprocity exists at every level: even our immune systems are built through intimate relationships to others. Immune response is, in fact, a deep metaphor for the manner in which we can participate meaningfully in an ongoing world. Logan illuminates this by telling the story of two kami–Japanese spirits–in the form of mice who guard a Shinto temple; one sitting, one standing:
“In some places there has remained a common understanding that all creatures share these two modes of being, in science, in song, and in prayer. One challenges the enemy directly, the other surrounds evil and causes it to surrender.”
This helps us understand the cost of relationship mentioned above: response can take the form of a direct challenge, an honest reflection, a sacrifice. It takes a lot to be a good neighbour; to keep our shared environment healthy and whole. It is no small ask. In fact, when you think in terms of price, it can be burdensome to the point of absurdity, but this whole essay is to remind you that there are ways of living which are priceless:
“We have not gone too far beyond our ancestors in intelligence, but we have forgotten one thing that they deeply knew: the instinct of thanksgiving.”
We come together, and we grow apart. Sometimes the world works with us, sometimes we are offered resistant materials to train our hands, temper our hearts, and still our minds. Despite all this, the one constant is our ability to give thanks for the life that has been given us and the neighbours we have to live it with. Trees–”more perceptive, more intelligent, more generous, and more persistent than we”–have always taught us how to adapt to constant change so that our thanks may be expressed not only in the words we choose, but in how we grow.
“What a wonderful word is anastomosis. You can hear it happening as you say the word: ah-nass-tow-mow-sis. It is the way in which branches that have separated, rejoin, then repart. Ahnass . . . we part; towmow . . . rejoin, sis . . . we part again. The rivers of airways in the lungs through which the blood flows to harvest oxygen anastomose. The meandering slows the blood enough to fill it with oxygen. In your guts the same principle slows the passage of digested food so that its goodness can be harvested for the body’s use. Veins and arteries anastomose. Every leaf of every plant is a network of anastomosed veins that distribute water to the chloroplasts, as well as distribute the products of photosynthesis. Slime molds anastomose. So do highways.”
“Trees are among the most creative creatures on Earth. What we do with words in language—making infinite combinations out of finite structures and finite parts—trees do with their branches out of their flesh.”
Of course, your guts and your veins and your lungs already embody all these teachings. Yet you can still conduct your life wholly, can yet engage creatively and give your conscious thanks for all the days given you to be present, for all the ways in which you are gathered, and all the ways in which you are growing into your part.
“Modern change is not inevitable. We can choose relationship. We can choose responsibility. We can choose the commons. We can choose a life where head, heart, and hand work in concert. It is not a Romantic or a nostalgic dream. It is an enterprise like any other, and maybe it is worth the hard work.”
“Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.”
– Shunryu Suzuki
The trees teach us to live in the presence of our days, and they show us how to respond musically as we try to live as good neighbours to one another. What do they have to say about our culture at large? Again, we return to an old Kernel idea: we are each other's environment.
Increasingly, the commons we spend the most time in together is characterised by collective psyche, rather than geography (in either case, the commons is still very definitely physical). When we look at the commons in this light, we can recover an idea which has always resounded at its heart, irrespective of the debates abouts its particular form:
“[Our ancestors] did not aim for permanence or monumentality. They aimed for a way to reach, to meet, to talk, to trade and to sing with one another [...] We may not do exactly what they did for the reasons that they did, but they give us the power to imagine new ways to act like that. It is no longer a commons for wood or grazing, but a commons for the imagination.”
The commons is always, and primarily, a way of being. When it is held as a way of being between many people, then it can manifest in various forms, from shared land to shared landing pages. Most importantly, these sites are not individual monuments. They are ways of reaching one another, for this is what truly roots us wherever we are: a felt sense that I belong with you.
“Here was responsibility in the etymological sense. The word comes from the Latin responsum, meaning “answered” or “offered in return.” In the Ordenanza de comunales, the Law of the Commons, one provision states that in lieu of paying a fee to use the land, you might do auzolan, service for the common good.”
Logan is well aware of the arguments against the commons. In fact, he writes a whole chapter about it, beginning with Thomas Kuhn’s phrase “paradigm shift” (deconstructed here) and Garret Hardin’s phrase “the tragedy of the commons”, based on an 1883 essay in which the term was coined by an English economist arguing in favour of the enclosures of common land. Ultimately, however, a boundary object–another kind of delightful edge–which can both be used to enclose and to protect illustrates how it’s not really about reductive academic argument:
“Whether or not a living hedge is cheaper or lasts longer than a wire fence, whether the creatures living in the hedge are on balance better or worse for the crops in the field, whether diversity is better in itself or not. . . . Perhaps these nicely weighed matters of debate miss the point. The making, the maintenance, and the use of a living hedge require attention and response. A good hedge layer has an intelligence focused not strictly on innovation but on seeing what is before his eyes clearly and responding in a way that helps it to go on.”
“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
– Mary Oliver
The hedge–this living boundary object with multiple different uses depending on the kind and quality of attention that is put into its creation and maintenance–is perhaps most exemplary of Logan’s practical perspective on life.
“We would be better to focus more on acts and less on looks. Hedging puts us into the landscape intimately. It makes us pay attention. When we pay attention, we are repaid in many ways. Attention manifests itself in our activity, not simply in our reflection. The activity may produce only marginal benefits, but the attention multiplies these exponentially.”
When head, heart, and hands act in concert with reverence for the resistant materials of this world, the result can only be the sort of loveliness we find in a neighbourly face we have worked, fought, lived and loved with for a lifetime. This knowing love is a force of nature; it is perhaps the force of nature. When we give it our attention, it gives us a way back to our own source. The activity of concerted attention helps us befriend ourselves and the worlds in which we take part.
“We knew trees the way we know friends: what they like and don’t like, how they are likely to respond to a thing we do with them, what we should under no circumstances try with them. Each exchanged with the other. There is no call to think people had to be altruists to do this. Rather, they knew what was good for them better than we do.”
A great teacher once offered this simple prayer of gratitude: “Thank God for the little I know. Thank God even more for how little I know.” The little that we know (and how little we know) is revealed when we open ourselves to intimate friendship and all the entanglements it entails:
“This I would say is knowledge of objective truth. It is not thinking. It is not feeling. It is the training of perception in the face of resistant materials. It is need and thought adjusting to the real. It is a new participation in the world of relationship, one through which a strange kind of flexible precision emerges unbidden.”
This precisely spontaneous force of nature, when attended to with real gratitude, enables us to realise the heart of regenerative movements: “difficult love”.
“Love made its own sign: a meal that might be quickly eaten but with lasting thanks, or a basket that lived as long as its maker.”
“The trees are not conscious. They are something better. They are present.”
“The woods brought us from the Neolithic to the edge of the modern world. They showed us how to work with them and with one another in a way that was good for all. I had started out looking for a book of instruction, and instead found a way of life that had brought us from the mesolithic to the modern. It involved not just trees, not just people, but each bringing help to the other [...] The more I learned from the generosity of the trees themselves and of the people who still work among them, the less I felt the need for a set of rules.”
There is no set of rules complex enough to capture this world, just as there is no amount of capital which can capture your innermost truth. We are fundamentally related to this world, just as this world is related through us.
“People then cannot act as a realm that is apart from nature. Everything has spirit, energy, and everything is enmeshed with everything else.”
More than anything, we are called to exercise our virtue as stewards by knowing when to stop so that we may become more intimately aware of how life moves everywhere with us; and knowing how to flow so that we may respond to the balance we are still asked to uphold.
“They had no idea of the slow, relentless, healing power of woodlands, or that they heal not by means of wealth but through poverty and time […] With patience, the life-giving poverty of this sandy seashore landscape will return, the sandy soil slowly enriched by the life and death of its native flora.”
Here, at last, is the one instruction worth following. Build open, common protocols with your own poverty centred in your awareness. Appreciate the extent of the circle in time you are attempting to draw. This is not just fancy words: Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake mechanism is literally self-healing too. Live up to the protocols we use. Maybe then a virtual wood will grow from which Ether’s Phoenix can arise, burning each part at its right time so that it may live on forever.
“What if new life does not come only from the centers of power, wealth, resource gathering, and exchange? What if it comes too from the margins, the extremities, the growing tips, the sprout lands?”
“Life in this sense is a kind of shimmering, where you see the uniqueness of an organism at one moment and its ramified countlessness at the other. In the starlight of this thought, you begin to glimpse another view of ever more.”
“It is the same and not the same. It is the shimmering. This is what the sprouts teach: immortality is not a matter of holding on, but of letting go.”
“This is the process of phoenix regeneration.”
Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn't amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.
After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened
to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.