A strange Spring altogether. In late December the flowering quince began to blossom. For Christmas and two weeks afterwards, the bare branches frothed with that peculiar deep pink, at the foot of the yard. Then, just when we thought we had escaped, a month of hard winter, and the hard cold left flower and bud a rotten fruit color. Now, fifteen or twenty flowers hunker down toward the core of the plants while the outer branches fill with the round dots of green – not necessarily protectively, but one has a sense of the wholeness of the plant, of something with a discrete life principle.
            The sparrows came into the forsythia early in the winter. The ground drops away toward the back, and in these narrow houses, I’ve trellised up the forsythia for privacy by the side of the back porch. The sparrows come into the forsythia and the wisteria, just beyond it, out of fear of the hawks, who also move in-town in the winter. In the mornings the hawks sweep up into the neighbors’ house-topping trees and sit silent, waiting for the unwary sparrows and finches. So the finches and sparrows hunkered down in the forsythia and began eating the buds. We put out food to distract them, but it only made it worse. The flocks doubled or tripled in size. Now, where there should be thousands of golden flowers, we literally have one or two blossoms at the stem ends.
            The lingering cold for the last two or three weeks has kept everything in that late March, early April mode. Only the bulb flowers are blossoming. The brief break, two or three weeks ago, brought out the crocuses, but they were gone before this late cold settled back in. So we’ve had the daffodils, blooming in a kind of suspended awakening. The hyacinths are coming on. But it seems like we have at least two zones in the back yard. Everything at the foot of the yard blooms appreciably later. So we don’t even see the daffodils from the kitchen window. The ones below are just starting to open.

            The quince take me back to the farm. We had a quince outside the kitchen, edged in against the yew that spread across the front of the house. The truth is, I noticed it, but in a kind of negative way. I think it kept getting some vine in it, perhaps honeysuckle. Sut, my father, probably pulled the vine out on a regular basis. But the combination of vine and quince always put me off. It wasn’t until the farm was gone that I realized how much I missed the quince in the Spring.

            Growing old is a strange business. The mania of my childhood is gone. Stuff that I thought was integral to my consciousness, the anxiety and driving hunger, have proven to be external. But the consciousness is still the same. That is, the consciousness itself has no age. ‘The weight of memory’. But it’s a peculiar weight, the intricate web of the past, not something I live in, but labyrinthine in its presence. At the same time, by counterpoint, it proves that consciousness itself is ageless.

            We were not farmers. My father was a theoretical mathematician and a professor. Finally, I like to think of us as kind of hyper-suburbanites – people who fled out to the nether edge of the suburban wave, although the wave has now inundated the farm. But where we went was probably more provincial than any area of the east coast outside of Appalachia. The Mennonites had controlled the township for generations and kept the roads out or unpaved until perhaps ten or fifteen years before we arrived.
            I wonder if anyone now can have the experience I had growing up. Do small farms exist any more? Most of the small farmers near us worked swing shift in the steel mills. Farming was their life way, but not necessarily their income. The land was open. As a teenager, I could walk two different routes, one five miles the other ten miles, and not walk directly past a house. And this was a valley of farms and some small house-lot properties.
            I sit here at the computer now listening to the birds and watching the sun rise. Soon, I will have to get up and move one of the curtains to keep the sun out of my eyes. I have learned to handle the computer because my vocation is to write. I remember walking around the farm with my new transistor when I first got it. But after one or two times, I felt ridiculous, and left it home. And I was a pinball addict at the local general store. So I suppose I understand the gizmo freak mentality.
            Recently, I watched a major housebuilding corporation strip off the topsoil on a large local lot, strip off seven or eight feet of subsoil, plant a row of slabs and basements and backfill the ground to a perfect smoothness around the particleboard and plastic-sided ‘mansions’. It’s not just that I have an organic sense of the soil; that soil itself is essentially an organism, which this kind of action destroys. And it’s not necessarily about the shoddiness of the construction or materials, or any of the usual ‘green’ concerns. It’s that no child will ever wander over the naturally hummocky ground again, and find some native object that awakens the human sense of delight.

            Samvatsaro vai prajapati, says the late Vedic text. ‘Prajapati is truly the year,’ according to the standard and somewhat appropriate translation. But what it actually says is, ‘Prajapati is the same as the calf’ – or ‘heifer’, if you will.
            Prajapati is literally ‘lord of birth’. But one of the most notable classical texts directly associates Prajapati with the inception of the birthlight. ‘With the light of the seed, Prajapati enacts creation within [or ‘prior to’] the womb.’ And this active light– mahato mahiyan, ‘greater than the greatest’ – ‘embraces the celestial waters, pervades existence’ and is ‘rooted in the stars’. That is, Prajapati is the lord of Cause and causality, as well as an intimate, if abstract, principle. In other words, if we strip out the militaristic and nationalistic elements in Yahweh, Prajapati is a close match.
            The heifer is the year because it takes the heifer a year to grow to its full bulk. This is something one learns on the farm. And what one learns on the farm, as well, is that this year is not linear – nor is it strictly cyclical. The farming year is formally cyclical. But the year of the heifer is developmental. And the farmer knows that the year is not cyclical. Every year is unique.
            The Vedic heifer is also sacrificial. When we enter the late Vedic or Upanishadic period, perhaps we are put off by the standard opening, the beginning of Brhadaranyaka Upanishad – the horse sacrifice. But, if we read it with the eye of practice, so to speak, we may recognize that what is being sacrificed is not an external animal, but the animal power of our own existence. ‘The eye of the sacrificial horse is the dawn.’ And the ultimate animal power of our own existence is the whole of our perception, the ‘great body’ of our awareness. We are sacrificing the whole of our perceptual world as the power of our awareness, the horse we ride, moment by moment, through the eye of consciousness.

            I’m sure we could go into a long disquisition here about the two cultures colliding in the Vedic script, the sedentary agrarian and the nomadic horseman. But, obviously, the reality is far more complex. And, of course, it has little or nothing to do with our issue here, except that horse and cow have some transitional equivalency. As we know, the sacred cow is characteristic of the India of the recent past and perhaps the present as well. Sacrifice has the same vector, whether we are offering a horse, a cow, yogurt, ghee and honey, or some trivial object that represents a significant personal value. The heifer may represent wealth in a herding community. But it is not a power in the same frame as the horse. And the sacrifice here is not actually a sacrifice.
            The heifer is the year itself. The offering we are making is consciousness itself. But the sacrifice is not a giving up, but a seizing. ‘Prajapati is truly grasping the whole of the year’. The year is a cycle of feeling, a cycle of awareness. But, essentially, I can guarantee that you have never followed the year, moment by moment, in terms of this cycle of awareness, this cycle of feeling, unless you have made a tremendous, conscious effort. But first of all, you have to recognize the moment of nature as a moment of feeling, a moment of experience unique unto itself, so to speak. This is Spirit, in one of its most intimate and immediate manifestations.
            When we take our face out of the screen, when we go out into nature, not to master rocks or water, but to touch the essence of the moment of nature, we can begin this sacrificial process. And while I have just said it involves no sacrifice, but a seizing, that seizing is the ultimate sacrifice, since it means you will eventually have to sacrifice everything except the moment of nature, moment by moment, until you have ‘accomplished’ the year, until you have become the heifer of the year.

            I still have a problem with this time of year. The moment between today – the pinkness of the trees on the hill and the blossoming daffodils – and the first full green. The golden madness of nature still overwhelms me.
            Perhaps this year I will close the gap.