The trees have become 

suddenly very happy

it is the rain…

–Mary Oliver, from Maples

I didn’t make it here last week. I wrote an article, a paper, I took a midterm, I read several dense textbook chapters. There’s only so much sitting one can do in a week’s time; I can manage about half of that, which was halved again by the warm sunshine and the garden chores that drew me outside between my deskboundedness. 

But the maples are blooming, which brings me back to the page. 

One of the many delights of attention I’ve been gifted by the natural world is the realization that all trees bloom. Not just the showy ones, like the cherries and apples that are covered in powdery pink and white blossoms at the moment or the dogwoods that have only today joined the party. Not just the ones that bear the fruit or nuts that we eat. But all of them. Conifers and alders bloom in cones. And maples bloom in the most beautiful cascading clusters of bright green flowers just before they leaf out.

At the start of last week’s end of term mayhem, Alex cut one forked maple branchlet, dripping with the verdant flowers from both of its ends. I set it in a vase on the kitchen table. So beautiful was the spectacle, I cut a second and third branchlet, each forked in the same proportion as the first with a cluster of blooms at each fork’s tip. I added them to the vase with the first: six maple blooms, each sprinkling their golden pollen onto the table top which, incidentally, is also big leaf maple. 

Between textbook chapters and discussion posts and transcript reading I visited and revisited the blooms. Infant leaves, four per bloom, began uncurling their fists in the warm air and sunlight that visited intermittently throughout the week. The tree’s architecture was made apparent in miniature on the table top: the scaled dimensionality of it all, the counterbalancing of the leaves growing in cardinality to each other, the interplay of clear design rules with the chaos of life’s insistence. It might be my favorite bouquet to date. 

And now onto an equally busy week (though with less sunshine by the looks of it), with finals and more textbook reading, and, happily, a deep dive into Mary Oliver’s psyche. I’ve chosen her as the subject of one final paper, an excuse to dwell in the natural numinosity that is her style, an apt simultaneity to lingering in my meditation on maples. 

“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” she concludes in the title essay in the collection Upstream. “Oh, good scholar,” she writes in her poem Mindful from the collection Why I Wake Early, “how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these.”

It’s easy to wish these jam-packed days into the past. To imagine a world in which one could arrive, with a snap, on the far shore of a big task or particularly busy stretch having accomplished all that needs doing without actually having to slog through it, fretting about deadlines and all the tasks that linger, unfinished, on the to do list. But to do so right now would mean to miss the maples blooming. And so they keep me company while I slog and fret away, uncurling their leaf tips, one at a time, reminding me of the temporal nature of it all–the beauty and the burnout. 

Arriving at the far shore of winter last week was a wet affair. It rained on the Vernal Equinox. Heavily. I took a long walk late in the afternoon with a friend and my dog, and after a couple hours we were, all three, drenched and splattered with mud. 

The green was as saturating as the rain on Spring’s first day. We wandered for nearly two hours; I could’ve gone on for two more–feeling the verdure of this place working its way across the semipermeable membranes that envelope me, into my bloodstream. A sense of ease, a slowing down. A bit of it cold induced.

Green is a constant in the Pacific Northwest. It’s likely a big part of what drew me to this place years ago, and likely a big part of what’s held me here since. The cedar, the fir, the hemlock, the sword fern–all green, all year long. The lichen that drips from winter-bare branches of deciduous trees, the moss that grows in tufts of varying densities and hues on their trunks: green. The jewel-tone green and sheen of madrona leaves and evergreen huckleberries. The lime green of the mosses that love the tipping alder and the bare patches in the grass most. 

In a week spent away from home recently, in the Midwest which was still very much in winter, I was struck by the absence of green in the forest, which I was lucky enough to have nearby and be in almost daily. But I looked for green and didn’t find it, except in the expanses of lawn where last year’s grass had been beaten and bruised by winter for three months. What a strange experience–I felt it deeply that week–to be in a place, the woods, entirely without its signature color. 

I’ve come to the sense that I’m not only bathing in but breathing this year round green. I’m realizing that without it I can’t seem to find my breath. 

Life is a green madness just now…

–Vernor Vinge

At home again on Bainbridge Island, the first spring greens are layering into the landscape. The red huckleberry canes have brightened to their seasonal lime. Their first leaves are spreading in the lengthening light. The alder are dotted with fat green buds: on-the-verge, ready to unfurl and get down to the business of photosynthesizing.

The meadow is suddenly lush. New blades of grass poke up everywhere. The ocean spray’s annual leafing out is underway—that same lime green of the other young leaves, peeking from beneath last year’s spent and rusted blooms.

Pioneering sprigs of arugula have taken skyward in the planter on the balcony where we grow our salad greens, safe from browsing deer. Spring is on. Green is off and running.

“Foliage colors improve relaxation and emotional status of university students from different countries,” a 2021 study claims in its title. And the results are interesting: overall, being exposed to foliage in a variety of green tones enhanced feelings of relaxation and calmness in a group of university students. But the specific tones to which the study’s participants most positively responded was a distinct cultural preference. 

Mightn’t this suggest that place plays a role in which green tones we’re drawn to, I wonder? The study doesn’t speculate, of course, it merely suggests more research be done. And urgently: noting that depression, “is expected to be the key driver of disease burden around the world by 2030.” 

I can’t help but muse on. Is it that foliage is green? Or that green is foliage–the color of sustenance, of food security, of life? 

It’s impossible to detach tone from texture from tang. Green is more than just visual stimulation–of a greater variety than any other color available to the human eye. It’s as many tastes. It’s as many feels. It’s malachite and chlorophyll. It’s braille and silk and fuzz. Its textures layer onto its sharpnesses of a thousand delicious varieties: oxalic acid, serrano, pea shoot, peppermint. 

I’m craving green right now. 

I made a soup inspired by it over the weekend, roasted hatch chiles in white beans with an all-things-green emulsion–cilantro, lime zest and juice, jalapeño, olive oil–drizzled on top. 

We talked that night of drinking the spring nettles in tea. I made a mental note to tuck leather garden gloves in my pocket before my next walk in the woods. 

And soon come the fir tips. And soon the fiddleheads. And soon the peas and tender lettuces.

Soothing nervous systems the hemisphere over with the assurance that this weary world is still committed to its enduring cycles, still nourishing us, still lifing out all around us with its signature green on green on green.

On a walk with a friend on Sunday, while circling Blakely Harbor, traversing the top of Fort Ward’s high cliff, dropping to its shoreline and climbing up again, we chatted about the things forty year old women chat about on long walks: the joys and difficulties of partnership, youthful injuries that have become chronic ailments, what we’ve (finally) accepted about ourselves, our aging bodies, areas in which we’re (still) hopeful for change, our tight pelvic floors. All the while I kept my eyes open and a part of my attention trained for Skunk Cabbage. 

Tis the season, after all. Skunk Cabbage is the second native flower to grace our coastal Pacific Northwest forests once Indian plum’s white blooms are replaced by lime green foliage. I’ve felt an expectation verging on impatience for this year’s yellow flares. 

Alternately called Bog Lantern, Skunk Cabbage’s large, canary yellow flowers push up through the mud and decay of last year’s green things. I later learned they do this not because the air is warming (though it is), but because Skunk Cabbage is capable of thermogenesis.

Skunk Cabbage, which are related to taro and were a traditional food source, create their own heat by breaking down the starches in their rhizomes. This heat generation creates a warm pocket of air around Skunk Cabbage that keeps its immediate environment as much as thirty-six degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than the environmental conditions in which it grows. That temperature differentiation allows the plant to bloom in winter, to attract the first active pollinators, and to even melt surrounding snow. 

I didn’t know this on Sunday. I only knew that the bright yellow of this flower was a harbinger of spring. I only knew that my habit of looking for solace in nature has yet to fail me. I only knew that the concept of a bog lantern felt particularly attune with our collective needs right now. Patrick Watson’s Lighthouse lyrics kept coming to mind:

Leave a light on in the wild

‘Cause I’m coming in a little blind

Dreaming of a lighthouse in the woods

Shining a little light to bring us back home

We finally spotted Skunk Cabbage, down along the paved trail that runs the seaside length of the former US Army Coastal Artillery Corps installation. It flared right at the trail’s edge in standing, murky water. A tangle of Salmonberry’s thorned canes, which will soon gift us the next of our wild blooms, surrounded it. I felt a wash of grateful relief.

I came home and, after an evening spent wading through the intricacies of the neurotransmitter serotonin as it relates to inherited predispositions for anxiety that seem to be catalyzed by environmental distress, I crawled into bed with some decidedly lighter reading. Cascadia Field Guide is a poetic, celebratory collection of Pacific Northwest flora and fauna, a guidebook for seekers of a more melodic fluency in natural phenomena. 

“The deep, lush, paddle-shaped leaves of Skunk Cabbage are one of the first greens to green in Cascadia’s spring, pushing up even through snow with a metabolic heat of their own creation.”

—Cascadia Field Guide, edited by E Bradfield, CM Fuhrman, and D Sheffield

I flipped through to the entry and accompanying poem on Skunk Cabbage. I read and reread the passage, a bit gobsmacked. A plant capable of thermogenesis? I always assumed this superpower was unique to mammals. Here I was, plumbing nature for an antidote to existential anxiety, and the message I received, with Skunk Cabbage as a teacher, was that it might be time to dig deep and generate one for myself.

What does this moment call for? This is a question my therapist repeated probably hundreds if not thousands of times in the nearly ten years we worked together. Today, my answer to that question is thermogenesis: the ability to call on the resources within me to stave off the cold in a proverbial winter that is, by some measures, nearly four years out from spring. 

On my walk this morning, I went in search of Skunk Cabbage again. In every place where the land dips and water sits, I crouched down and scanned for its telltale flares. I didn’t see any, nor do I remember finding it here in the past, but I wanted to pay my newly enlightened respects.

I had already turned uphill toward home when I thought of one more place to look. I doubled back, dropped down a steep trail that ends at the water’s edge, and there it was on a flat and watery ledge, a light on in the wild.