April Flowers (Week Fifty-Five)

04/03/2021

April Flowers (Week Fifty-Five)

Last April I didn't go to the park, so I was excited to see it this year. The daffodils, like a group of school kids, reminded me of being in the schoolyard at recess, running around with mindless exuberance until the bell rang and it was time to go back inside, which for me was always accompanied by a pang of dread. Elementary school was on some levels (mostly but not completely unconscious) a disturbing institution. The naked authority, the indoctrination into a system in which I felt fundamentally out of place, the intense pressures to conform (for me, made more intense by a growing fear that I could never conform).

I realized that the dread I had felt at as child on the steps of my elementary school was not so different than what I felt now contemplating the end of lockdown and a 'return to society.' In some ways it seemed that life was an ongoing cycle of dread and not-dread, feelings that correlated to one's proximity to the system. Maybe spring was a good time to focus on the not-dread (without denying that the dread was still present, just further away for the moment, like the tides).

I felt very little dread enjoying the banks of forsythia spilling over the edge of the rocks.

Or thinking about how yellow is the color of early April.

Sometimes I think that forsythia deserve more acclaim, but it's hard to begrudge the magnolia.

A month ago, this landscape was covered with snow, and now it's covered with complicated daffodils.

Spring is a good reminder that the natural world is waking up, and to hope that we can do the same. To enjoy this brief phase of minimal dread.

It's also a good time to think about what happens if we don't wake up, and to begin dreading the same.

Posted at 09:54 AM in Expression, Science Projects | Permalink

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Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine

Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.

Music Video: Remembrance of Things Past

Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.

Video: The Chaos Detective

The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.

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Expression//Reaction//ScienceProjects

04/03/2021