20

Deer Park 鹿柴

Empty mountain — no one to be seen,
yet voices are heard.

Returning sunlight enters the deep forest
and shines again on green moss.

— Wang Wei, translated by David Hinton, from Selected Poems of Wang Wei, New Directions 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 20: Empty Mountain, No One to Be Seen. It’s the death rattle of January; the universe has withdrawn into its mystery school, and today on the hotline were coming to you live from the season of the occult and the obscure, where knowledge is transmitted sideways through shadow and soil, through what sleeps, stores, and waits beneath the surface. 

This voice rises from the deepest still point of winter, the solar term known as Major Cold, winter after the explanations have run out. Major Cold is an apprenticeship conducted through mushroom and moss, wet wood and mycelium, through sleeping, storage, shadow, and survival. The ground is sealed, the sap withdrawn, and the animals who remain have aligned themselves with the season’s logic -- burrowing, hiding, waiting -- as outward growth gives way to a quieter, inward choreography.

This week’s poem is so quiet, it almost refuses to be read aloud. Deer Park opens onto a mountain emptied of figures, a landscape stripped of markers and narrative cues. And yet! The world is anything but vacant. Sound persists. Light returns. Moss continues its patient work in the shadows. Life moves laterally rather than forward.

Nothing happens here.
And yet everything happens here.