19

My mind is free of troubles

Nothing but mountains meet my eyes

The P’eng soars into the sky

A leopard blends into mist

I’m more like the flowering plum

I wait for the year-end cold



— Stonehouse, translated by Red Pine, from The Zen Works of Stonehouse: Poems and Talks of a 14th Century Chinese Hermit, Mercury House Publishing


Thank you for calling The Botanarchy Hotline. The Botanarchy Hotline is medicine disguised as a poem, delivered through the portal of your phone. It’s a ham-radio séance between you and the living Earth, for those ready to be bewildered back to life.

The transmission at the end of your telephone line is Episode 19: I’m More Like The Flowering Plum. It’s the first flush of January, dormant shrubs are lying like Victorian ladies waiting for rain to come a’calling, and today on the hotline, we tip our hats to the poetry of timing, make like the flowering plum, and delight in the long, slow seduction of winter.

This broadcast is coming to you live from deep within the quiet architecture of the solar term Minor Cold. Minor Cold is a threshold within a threshold, a season of refinement rather than revelation. It arrives after the solstice drama has passed, after light has been reborn quietly, without witnesses. No one was watching. No one was meant to.

Here, there’s just enough cold to sharpen the air, to tighten the sinews of the world and remind everything alive that winter is not finished speaking.
What remains now is patience.
Compression.
Timing.

Minor Cold asks us a simple, exacting question:
What can endure the cold?
What is rooted deeply enough to wait?