21

Moss

Daylight never comes here,
yet Spring’s arrived:
moss flowers, small as grains of rice,
practice being peonies.

— Yuan Mei, translated by JP Seaton, from I Don't Bow to Buddhas: Selected Poems of Yuan Mei, Copper Canyon Press



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 21: Practice Being Peonies. It’s the Lunar New Year, the hills are luminous with winter’s excess, and today on the hotline we practice the art of being peonies, honoring the handoff from Water to Wood as the green current surges and sap begins its vertical prayer.

Today’s broadcast opens at Lìchūn, the solar term known as Start of Spring. Lìchūn is a threshold, a subtle realignment of the inner compass. It moves the way warmth returns to cold hands - slowly, unevenly, as a blush beneath the skin before language can catch up. Winter still grips the hills, green and swollen from stormwater. Frost lingers in the shadowed folds of canyon and eucalyptus. But beneath bark and skin and old vows, something ancient stretches and remembers how to rise. 

Direction wakes up before speed.
Desire wakes up before plan.

This is the season when potential grows moist and begins negotiating gravity. When what has been stored in darkness starts flirting with verticality.

And moss - our patron saint of Early Spring - is already rehearsing the seduction.

Moss.
Understory lover.
Shade dweller.
Keeper of slow green secrets.

Moss whispers "Begin low. Begin where the poem kneels.”

Daylight rarely touches this place, and still… spring has arrived.